Le Monde perdu

Willis O'Brien made some early shorts utilizing his unique concept of special effects, but it was this film, The Lost World, that made his vision first come to life so to speak. O'Brien makes the lost world full of dinosaurs that seemingly do everything. They eat, fight, move, and generally live on screen. The film is a fairly good adaption of Doyle's book, with Doyle even having a cameo in the film. A raging professor named Professor Challenger, played with gusto by Wallace Beery, says that dinosaurs live on a plateau somewhere off in the Amazon. He is disbelieved by all concerned, and he, with the help and support of a rich adventurer, a cynical zoologist, a newsman, and a daughter of a lost professor on a previous journey, sets out to prove that dinosaurs do indeed exist on Earth still. The film has a nice, quick pace and is very entertaining. Beery, Lewis Stone, and Bessie Love all do fine jobs acting. The film has a new marvelous score to go with its silent action. Best of all...the film boasts the special effects of O'Brien's genius. A fine, fine film.

This first, silent version of The Lost World is the best one for dinosaur fans as it has more dinosaurs in it than any other. I have two VHS copies of this, an hour long version and the restored copy, which lasts for about 100 minutes.

Professor Challenger leads a party into an uncharted part of the Amazon where prehistoric monsters still live. When there, they explore the land and see the many dinosaurs that roam it. They then decide to try and capture one of these alive and bring it back to London! They manage this and bring back a Brontosaurus, but it escapes and goes on the rampage through London, brings down Tower Bridge and then escapes down the Thames.

The stop-motion dinosaurs are done excellently by Willis O'Brien and also include Allosaurus, Tricertops and Pteranodon.

The cast includes Wallace Beery as Chellenger, Bessie Love and Lewis Stone.

This movie is a must see, especially if you are a fan of dinosaur movies like myself. Excellent.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

The Lost World (1925) D: Harry O. Hoyt. Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Wallace Beery, Lloyd Hughes, Alma Bennett, Arthur Hoyt, Margaret McWade. The special effects film of its time, a story based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle about an expedition to a lost world where dinosaurs rule. The version I watched was the most complete (running 93 minutes). Being a silent film, the actual plot is hard to follow but the special effects are terrific for a 77-year-old dinosaur movie. The most complete version was compiled from 8 different sources; that probably explains why the film seems very choppy and incomplete. All in all, a historically entertaining movie and certainly recommended to silent film buffs. RATING: 7 out of 10. Not rated.

In this 1925 silent era film, a Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) leads a group of British explorers to South America, to prove to the civilized world that there exists a land of living prehistoric creatures. What the explorers find is exactly that ... a rugged Amazon plateau inhabited by all kinds of dinosaurs. It's a wonderful film concept befitting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventure novel. The dinosaurs were brought to cinematic life via stop-motion animation, the first time that the then new technique had been applied, on such a grand cinematic scale. For its visuals alone, "The Lost World" is an important film.

The problem I have is not with the film, but with the way the film has been mishandled in the eighty years since it was released. Much of the original film was lost or cut out, a sad commentary on the way our culture has underestimated the value of silent films. Recently, the film has been at least partially restored. That, in turn, has led to confusion as to the extent to which the film being watched reflects the original.

My understanding is that there is or was: (1) an original full length version, no longer available; (2) a thirty-two minute version shown as a short film; (3) a sixty-three minute original DVD version; and (4) a ninety minute restored, extended DVD version complete with soundtrack and commentary. None of these versions are exactly alike, and there may be other versions as well.

The version I watched was on DVD, and was sixty-three minutes in length; there was no soundtrack, no commentary. Since this version is vastly different from the original, and different from other versions, a conventional critique would be unfair. All that I can do is to make a couple of general observations.

The special effects were impressive for their time. But what I most liked was the film's sense of three-dimensional scale, as shown in many scenes, the tree bridge to the plateau, for example, or the rope ladder hanging down the side of the cliff with a person climbing down. Such scenes convey a sense of distance and height, important to any physical adventure or risk. What I found disconcerting was the scenes of dinosaurs detached from the characters. Most of the time, but not always, these dinosaur scenes were shown from the POV that would be optimal for the cinematic viewer, rather than from the POV of the characters. In other words, the dinosaurs were usually shown out of context to the film's narrative.

"The Lost World" (1925) is an important contribution to early cinema. Although the film may be somewhat tedious to watch and technically crude by today's standards, depending on version, the film will most surely be appreciated by film historians and by technicians interested in the evolution of cinematic special effects.

This was the first movie I ever taped when I got my first VCR back in the 1980's. I saw it was going to be on at 3:00 a.m., so I decided to try the programming to see it it worked. It did. I was so excited. The movie is so much fun. It has Wallace Beery as a borderline madman scientist leading an expedition to a far off island to find dinosaurs. There is a subplot of a reporter who is trying to talk him into letting him go along. There are scenes where Professor Challenger (Beery) chases and assaults this man because he hates reporters. Of course, we all know the story. They do bring back a dinosaur and it gets loose (ala King Kong) and leaves a path of destruction. The special effects are like Claymation, but one could only wonder how exciting and impressive these things were in their time. As a period piece, I urge people to see this. There are full length prints of it, not just the one some have commented on, which only shows the dinosaur scenes. If you have an open mind, you will have a lot of fun.