The Lost World (1925)

Toronto Film Society presented The Lost World (1933) on Sunday, September 29, 2024 as part of the Season 77 Virtual Film Buffs Screening Series, Programme 1.

Production Company: First National Pictures.  Produced by: Earl Hudson.  Director: Harry O. Hoyt.  Screenplay: Marion Fairfax, based on the novel “The Lost World” by Arthur Conan Doyle.  Cinematography: Arthur Edeson.  Film Editor: George McGuire.  Release Date: February 2, 1925.  Running time: 106 minutes.

Cast: Bessie Love (Paula White), Lewis Stone (Sir John Roxton), Wallace Beery (Prof Challenger), Lloyd Hughes (Ed Malone), Alma Bennett (Gladys Hungerford), Arthur Hoyt (Prof Summerlee).

The Lost World was the first the first feature-length film made in the United States, and possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect. A full sixty-eight years before Jeff Goldblum graced the screen shirtless after being attacked by a T-Rex in Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World thrilled audiences with a lifelike and terrifying parade of dinosaurs (in fact, Michael Crichton’s sequel to Jurassic Park was named The Lost World in homage to Doyle’s novel and film). Without sharing the film’s origins, Conan Doyle showed clips of the movie to The Society of American Magicians in 1922, including Harry Houdini, and the next day The New York Times reported that his “monsters of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces.”

The Lost World is a prelude to other more commonly known monster adventure films, including King Kong (1933), on which Willis H. “Obie” O’Brien, stop motion pioneer, also worked. Obie, an avid film fan, came up with idea to animate the clay models he had been working on in a sculpting shop. His employer Watterson R. Rothacker happened to have the film rights for The Lost World and so they began to work at bringing the project to life together. With his team, Obie created about fifty models with ball-and-socket skeletons, rubber muscles, and latex rubber exteriors for the film – he even added small bladders in the models’ chests to simulate breathing!

A laborious process, it took Obie and his assistants 960 frames of film to achieve one minute of stop motion footage in walled off sets of up to 150 feet long and seventy-five feet wide, and often the models had to be repaired at the end of the day due to wear and tear. The film features scenes with both the animated dinosaurs with live-action footage of human beings, which Obie at first achieved by through split-screen, however his technique improved as filming progressed to the point where he could have both in one screen. After production, several of the dinosaur models were donated to the Museum of Arts and Sciences at Exposition Park in Los Angeles, and a few allegedly still survive today.

Originally 90 minutes long, the film has gone through many iterations. When Warner Brothers purchased First National Pictures, they cut 30 minutes of the movie, and in 1948 the 60-minute version was purchased by Encyclopedia Britannica who shrunk it down to a 5-min film intended for English classrooms and retitled it A Lost World, as Told by A. Conan Doyle.

In 1992 a near-complete print of the full film was discovered in the Filmovy Archiv of the Czech Republic, and additional footage was uncovered in a pair of private collections and in the Library of Congress, resulting in a new restoration in 1997.

Though the real stars of the show are the triceratops, allosauruses, stegosauruses and, of course, the uncharacteristically aggressive and wily brontosaurus, The Lost World also features a charming cast of humans. Wallace Beery, Best Actor Academy Award Winner for The Champ (1931), plays Professor Challenger, ridiculed by most of his peers for insisting dinosaurs are alive and well and roaming a plateau in the borders of Peru, Brazil, and Colombia. World traveler and explorer, Sir John Roxton is played by Lewis Stone, contract player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Lloyd Hughes plays Edward Malone, and Bessie Love, whose career spanned 7 decades, is played by Paula White.

Their motivations to embark on the expedition are primarily not exploitative in nature – for Challenger and White it is to rescue and redeem her father, Maple, and for Malone it is to impress his fiancée with his bravery and worldliness.  Interestingly, Conan Doyle sites Challenger, not Sherlock Holmes, as his favourite created character.

When they reach the plateau, mayhem ensues and the film culminates with the brontosaurus escaping when being lifted from the boat that transported him from South America, then swimming away in the Thames river – a perfect opening for a sequel, but this was in an era that pre-dated the Hollywood franchise machine. In 1998 The Lost World was deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. It can now be enjoyed by the masses on You Tube as it is old enough to be in the public domain.

A few more ‘fun facts’ about the Lost World:

• For live action scenes, an open sewer behind the MGM studio was used as a river.
• In April 1925, on a London-Paris flight by Imperial Airways, The Lost World became the first in-flight film to be shown to passengers.
• An early prologue that was lost showed Conan Doyle examining Obie’s models before sitting down at a typewriter to write The Lost World.
• During the London scenes we see a theater marquee advertising The Sea Hawk, in which both Wallace Beery and Lloyd Hughes were appearing.

Notes by Kathleen McLarty

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_World_(1925_film)
https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Lost_World_(movie_1925)

Thoughts On: “The Lost World” (1925)

https://psychobabble200.blogspot.com/2017/09/review-lost-world-1925-blu-ray.html

The Lost World (1925)

https://www.openculture.com/2015/07/watch-lost-world-1925-the-granddaddy-of-giant-monster-movies-like-the-lost-world-jurassic-park.html