The Lost World (1925)

Explorer Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) is taking quite a beating in the London press, thanks to his claim that living dinosaurs exist in the far reaches of the Amazon. Newspaper reporter Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes) learns that this claim originates from a diary given to him by fellow explorer Maple White's daughter, Paula (Bessie Love). Malone's paper funds an expedition to rescue Maple White, who has been marooned at the top of a high plateau. Joined by renowned hunter John Roxton (Lewis Stone), and others, the group goes to South America, where they do indeed find a plateau inhabited by pre-historic creatures, one of which they even manage to bring back to London with them while hilarity ensues.

Trivia: The Lost World is the first in-flight movie, shown on an Imperial Airways flight in a converted Handley-Page bomber from London, UK, to Paris, France, in April 1925. In July 1929, the Kodascope Libraries acquired the 16mm rights to this film. The original lavender protection positive itself was edited down to five reels to create the abridged 16mm Kodascope version. This abridged Kodascope version was the only one widely known to survive in the U.S. until a more extensive (but still incomplete) original tinted, toned and hand-colored 35mm print was found in 2003 in the hands of a private collector and purchased by Film Preservation Associates. While filming one of the stop-motion scenes, the cameraman spotted a pair of pliers in the picture. So as not to draw attention to them by having them suddenly disappear, he moved them a little at a time until they were out of the shot. This was the first full length feature film to utilize stop motion animation to create its creatures.

Wow. It still amazes me that the filmmakers could makes some of the movies they made back in the silent days. Now thus far I have watched the cream of the crop, as it were, of silent films, the ones that are still mentioned and remembered today and The Lost World is one of them. It has a wealth of interesting items in it. First is the scenery with South American jungles and the dinosaur plateau, and down town London. Second, the blending of stop motion with live action (except one time when Lloyd Hughes literally lost his head as it disappeared at the juncture of the live action and the stop motion sections). And then there are the dinosaurs. There was a surprising amount of time devoted to the dinosaurs and they were done well considering when they were done. You could see them breath, and fight, and looked puzzle, and just be dinosaurs. You can really see where King Kong got it's roots. You even saw where Lost World: Jurassic Park got some of it's story. In LW:JP a T-Rex gets loose in San Diego and rampages through town, while in The Lost World, it was a brontosaurs doing the damage in London. I think I am going to have to add this one to a list of most influential movies that Impman suggested I make. But, the movie is in no way flawless. There is little interaction between the dinosaurs and the adventures to the point that 90 percent of the dinosaur scenes have nothing to do with the people or plot, they are just dinosaurs being dinosaurs (cool, yes, but they don't drive any of the plot forward). Now that I mention the plot, it was kind of thin. The weird thing that I noticed has to do with Ms. Bessie Love. She is pretty much the only women in the movie and the daughter of the missing explorer that disappeared. What is weird is that she is the only one in the movie that they would get close-ups, and when they did show her she would be nervous and fidgety (of course, if your father was missing you might be nervous and fidgety too.). Then they had a guy dressed up in a half man half monkey suit, a sort of ape man character, that lived with a chimpanzee, why he was living with the chimp I have no idea, but he was (maybe it was a little jungle love). This guy kept watching the explorers and generally created a little havoc at times but that was it, he was kind of a superfluous character. They also had an actor in black face as the one and only guide/porter for the group.