Jurassic Plateau

Film: The Lost World (1925)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

Some movies are important because of the story they tell, the quality of what happens on screen, a break-out role for an actor, or are formative in the career of the director. Then, there are films like The Lost World from 1925, which is important because of technology. While not the first stop-motion film, it is the first one of feature length, or at least the first American feature-length film to feature stop-motion prominently. And how do you appeal to the sensibilities of the early movie-going public? You give them stop-motion dinosaurs, and a lot of them.

The Lost World is based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, who appears at the beginning of some prints of the film. This is a film that was considered lost in full—only a number of abridged copies remained, but an almost-full restoration has been created, giving us almost the entire original film. The original running time was about 106 minutes; the version I found runs about 102 with a short intro about the restoration, so maybe a total of 5 minutes missing.

Paula White (Bessie Love) returns from a failed expedition to a plateau in South America. Her father has disappeared on the journey, but the bigger news is that Paula has returned with her father’s journal. The journal shows drawings of living dinosaurs, which is enough for the intrepid Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) to proclaim that living dinosaurs still walk the Earth. Challenger decides to finance an expedition to rescue the missing professor and is accompanied by Paula, noted hunter John Roxton (Lewis Stone), and reporter Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes) as well as a couple of others. Lloyd, it turns out, is going not for a story, but because his fiancée has told him that she can’t marry a man who hasn’t faced real danger.

So, off we go to South America. You know going in based on the name of the movie and the poster for it that we’re going to be encountering dinosaurs, of course, and so we do. The Lost World plays all the hits when it comes to the dinosaurs that we’re going to get, or at least the hits for 1925. That means allosaurs, triceratops, and brontosauri stomping around. No matter that some of these creatures were separated by millions of years. We’re not here for scientific accuracy but to see dinosaurs fight each other.

Essentially, there are a couple of main plot points. The first is that our group of intrepid explorers reach their lost world via a bridge made from a felled tree, which is eventually knocked loose, trapping them on the plateau. Of course there’s going to be an active volcano that will require they figure out a way to leave. There’s also, for some reason, an ape man, a true miracle of evolution, given that it exists with creatures from 150 million years previous.

But again, none of this matters. We’re not here for the problem solving or the expected romance between Paula and Edward (despite his engagement back home). We’re here to see dinosaurs fight each other to the death. Even better, though, is the sequence where the volcano begins to erupt and the dinosaurs stampede toward the edge of the plateau.

In the modern age, we’ve become accustomed to stop-motion work that is so good that it looks completely seamless, and the far earlier, much more rudimentary work like this is easy to overlook or deride, but that shouldn’t be the case. While it’s obvious to us, it wasn’t back in the day, and for being extremely early stop-motion work, it’s pretty remarkable. The special effects work was done by Willis O’Brien, who went on to do the stop-motion work in King Kong; there are certainly similarities here.

The reality of The Lost World is that there aren’t any real surprises here. You should know exactly what you are getting when you step into this one. That there are no surprises doesn’t mean that this isn’t worth your time, though. We know going in that Paula and Edward are going to end up together. We know going in that the characters we’re supposed to like are going to be triumphant. That’s not why we’re here.

The Lost World, because of its age, is not going to stand up to the 70-year benefit in technology that we got for Jurassic Park and similar films. It’s not going to stand up to scientific scrutiny, because there’s no reason that there should be an ape man (and it makes me wonder about how influential this might have been on the old televisions show “Land of the Lost”). This is all about seeing dinosaurs on the big screen in 1925, and for the history of what it represents.

Why to watch The Lost World: Stop-motion dinosaurs!
Why not to watch: How are you going to make them believe in stop-motion triceratops after they’ve seen Jurassic Park?