The Lost World (1925)

As a 1925 production The Lost World is first-class.  The leading roles are played by well-known stars and the jungle ambiance is a rich mix of backlot greenery and O'Brien glass mattes.  Although the art direction lacks the classical, Doré- inspired look of Kong there are any number of unforgettable images, such as the dinosaur pushing the log from the top of the plateau, or the stampede of giant reptiles from an exploding volcano.  The story seems oversimplified and the romance dated, but trying to imagine the effect the fairly realistic dinosaurs had on 1925 audiences is even more difficult.  Kong's audience was knocked out of their seats, and many thought they were watching a real gorilla.  Many viewers of this picture may have taken its dinosaurs as real!  




Today's fans are going to need an appreciation of The Lost World's place in special effects history to understand the glory of O'Brien's work.  Marcel Delgado's monsters have the correct shape of the dinosaurs in paintings in Chicago museums, with realistic skins and claws, but many of them are oddly proportioned and under-articulated.  A giant ceratosaurus and styracosaurus are not only better detailed than most of the rest, but are also much better animated.  Were they perhaps given more of O'Brien's personal attention?  His previous comedy short subjects had made little attempt at naturalism.  Here the beautiful matte paintings and impressive split screens put live-action people together with the monsters, and give life and motion to giant dioramas by adding running rivers and smoke to animated scenes.
 

Some of the less anatomically convincing dinos wiggle little flipper forearms and have a crude, clay-like appearance.  Unintentional humor results when several of them are made to snarl by curling their lips like sneering cartoon characters.  But for every anthropomorphism (one dino does a double-take after pushing a brontosaurus off a cliff) there is something startling. A shot in which an animated carnivore looms out of the dark with glowing, blinking eyes is both ingenious and frightening!


Thanks to Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters magazine, we knew all about Willis O'Brien by the early 1960s.  The Irwin Allen remake was a kiddie favorite for us, but we didn't know that O'Brien's later years had been cursed with unmade movie projects and unfaithful producers.  An old-fashioned studio hand, O'Brien really didn't work much after the expensive flop Mighty Joe Young, and although his Oscar was proudly deserved, O'Brien's acolyte Ray Harryhausen took up the torch and ran with it.  Whereas Harryhausen linked up with a loyal producer, O'Brien found himself cheated again and again.  Typically, he'd be hired by producers (or simply present ideas on spec to them) who would sneak behind his back to make the movie elsewhere.  His screen story El Toro Estrella was ripped off by the King Brothers, who made half of it as The Brave One (winning an Oscar for best screenplay) and sold the other half, which became the inferior The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Rather than get better, non-Harryhausen stop-motion movies of the '50s tended to reinvent the wheel and make the same mistakes.  Even O'Brien's output didn't evolve due to lack of opportunity.  Just to keep active, he and his faithful associate Pete Peterson literally worked in their garages on things like The Giant Behemoth, a belated imitation of a Harryhausen film.  The 'producer' of O'Brien's King Kong vs. Frankenstein project ran away with it to Japan, where it became King Kong vs. Godzilla.  As with the 1960 Irwin Allen lizards-in-latex version of The Lost World, O'Brien only discovered that his name and ideas had been stolen when he read about it in the trades.

The original story had entire tribes of savage natives to contend with.  With their simian substitution the producers saved themselves expense and attracted some collateral interest via the then-current Scopes "Inherit the Wind" Evolution trial.  But the crowd scenes in the London finale show no signs of economizing -- these 'running mob' scenes are still impressive, and not matched for impact in a dinosaur movie until 1961's Gorgo.  This was the first time a prehistoric monster ran wild in the streets of a modern city, a concept not in the original book.  There, Challenger stood proudly as a Pterodactyl he brought back from South America flew around the Explorer's hall.  All the familiar 'monster on the loose' gags are here, including the drunk who thinks he's seeing d.t.'s and the woman who snatches a child from the path of the stampeding dino, another incident repeated verbatim for Kong.  Not among the restored bits is the fabled business where the dinosaur smashes its head into a public house, sending patrons flying.   (Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant)