The Lost World (1925)

Evolve or perish. It’s a maxim in the movies as it is in nature.

Willis O’Brien took these words to heart; we’re fortunate he did so. Like all great artists (and inventors), the animator was not easily satisfied—he was always pushing for something more complex, more adaptable, more compelling. By 1925, O’Brien had completed several short subjects using stop-motion technology, including The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915) and The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918). In 1933, he would bring dinosaurs and a great ape to life in his magnum opus, King Kong. That film’s stop-motion effects and live action were combined with more realism and drama than any the audience had seen before, and it was thanks, in part, to the techniques O’Brien developed for The Lost World—a film that, in its successes and its failures, pointed the way to a proper marriage between spectacle and story.

The movie’s based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel of the same name. Both concern an expedition by a group of men with different goals. Their shared destination is a plateau of rock, hidden deep in the Amazon jungle, upon which live creatures forgotten by time. Professor Challenger (played in the film by Wallace Beery) has been there before; however, without physical evidence to back up his claims, he’s become an object of ridicule back home in London. Challenger vows to return to the plateau and shut up his critics; this time, he’ll be joined by Professor Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt), a sceptic; Lord John Roxton (Lewis Stone), a big-game hunter and adventurer; and Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes), a timid newspaperman hoping to prove his courage to a shallow fiancé. Several servants follow.

The film adds a pretty girl, too. This is Paula White (Bessie Love); daughter of the explorer Maple White, who, in the movie’s version of events, followed Challenger into the rainforest the first time and never came back. Mr. White comes in handy in a couple of ways: first, his disappearance provides Challenger with the means to return to the jungle, as Malone’s paper agrees to fund the trip as a ‘human interest’ story. Second, White’s notebook of sketches (which made it home, even though he did not) provides us with several drawings of the dinosaurs we’re going to see, along with a diagram of the rocky plateau. This builds suspense, but more importantly, it helps us orient ourselves once the action starts. We know the animals are “tremendous in size and ferocity,” as Paula explains it, and the notebook’s doodles enforce the point, offering us scale drawings of cowboy-hatted humans and dinosaurs together. Many films have used this technique since, including Titanic (1991).

Anyone Challenger can’t out-think he will beat up. He is an irascible, arrogant and violent man, providing most of the film’s early humour. But the team manages to gel fairly well once they reach the Amazon basin, and then, the plateau. And Summerlee’s role as the cynic proves a thankless one, since Challenger’s claims are proven true even before they scale the craggy rock:
Through the jungle canopy, the party spies a Pteranodon alighting on the plateau to eat its meal.

We watch the Pteranodon fidget and eat, then we watch the faces of the explorers. They’re suitably amazed, but somehow, we aren’t. Like other animals in The Lost World (and in King Kong), the Pteranodon moves stiffly, and there is little sense of its underlying musculature, since the rest of its body stays unnaturally still while one part is in motion. Anatomically, though, O’Brien’s rubber model conforms to what we’ve seen in our picture books. If it didn’t move at all, we’d be inclined to believe in it.

The real problem is that this succession of scenes lacks energy, as do the dozen or so special effects sequences that follow it. O’Brien had figured out how to animate fairly life-like creatures—animals that looked accurate, moved at the correct speeds and even presented the minutiae of life (watch the Brontosaurus breathe in later scenes), but neither he nor director Harry O. Hoyt knew how to make the monsters and humans interact. The Lost World’s technical limitations inevitably place the humans at the bottom right of the screen, like scurrying ants, before some epic battle between Triceratops and Allosaurus; they look no more like a part of the action than if they’d walked onstage in front of an IMAX screen. O’Brien’s effects, intriguing on their own terms, end up slowing the film, because we never feel the humans are in danger. They say they’re in danger, but in the movies, seeing is believing, and none of Hoyt’s tricks can quite get around that.

One of his tricks was to cut from the dinosaur battle scenes (which appear to be long shots, though they aren’t) to close-ups of an actor’s face, usually Bessie Love’s. Her expressions of fear are meant to convey immediacy, but with no connecting shot between her and the dinosaurs (which are photographed in one, static take), we are left with a cheap looking montage.

The director also punctuates the humans’ quest with cuts to various, brief, dinosaur scenes. The dinosaurs’ activities in these scenes are, like the human activities they’re interrupting, mundane. I suppose this was meant for atmosphere (or to make use of extra footage O’Brien had produced), but they are too rapid to be effective that way. Had they been longer, The Lost World might have been a different film, though certainly not an action picture.

Hoyt’s last trick is to introduce an ape man (Bull Montana) as a live-action antagonist. The ape man pays more direct attention to the humans than the dinosaurs ever do (that’s part of the problem), but even he tends to do his damage from afar. This is necessary, because while the ape man may be more intelligent than the dinosaurs, the humans are armed. He, too, is more of an implicit threat than an actual one.

The result is a film that stands up better as a case-study in special-effects-development than it does as drama. Like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), it puts spectacle first, and therefore suffers today, because the audience’s expectations, like the technology itself, have grown more sophisticated. The Lost World is a better film, though; its acting is solid, especially Beery’s comic portrayal of Challenger. And in the film’s last sequence, in fact, O’Brien gets everything right.

In The Lost World’s best, and most famous scene, we witness a captured Brontosaurus rampage through the streets of London. (Click here, starting at about 2:20). At first, this scene falters like the others before it—we are told, rather than shown, how the huge animal’s cage broke loose over the dock and set it free. But things pick up as the Brontosaurus plows through the urban landscape. While O’Brien is still unable to fully integrate footage of the crowds with footage of the beast, he now makes use of life-scale modelling to bring the two elements together. Actors in the crowd are bowled over by a giant tail, for example, allowing the dinosaur to be ‘present’ among the extras. Then we see a mother and infant trapped in the dinosaur’s path. Hoyt cuts from the stop-motion animal to the cowering humans and then—crucially—inserts a shot of a giant, clawed foot bearing down upon them. This kind of shot, used liberally in King Kong, but nowhere else in The Lost World, is precisely the visual bridge the earlier film needed all along. O’Brien was continuing to grow.

Where to find The Lost World:
The Lost World is available on DVD through Image Entertainment. The extras are a little thin (a documentary would have been great, given the subject). The disc includes animation outtakes and a variety of production stills. Of note is the score, which combines native drums (an inspired choice) with what sounds like a theremin. The theremin, an electronic instrument used perfectly in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), sounds too alien here. The Lost World, weird though it may be, is altogether of this earth.