Flight of the Lost Balloon

I remember seeing this film on television multiple times in the early 1960s. It is roughly in the same style and genre of another Jules Verne story and film, "In Search of the Castaways" (1962), which was made into a film at almost the same time and was also shown multiple times on television around 1962-1964. As children, my sister and I were captivated by both these films, and we loved to re-watch both of them on television in those years whenever they were shown.

By today's standards the effects and acting are weak, but the film is still captivating, memorable, and fires the imagination. The film has a lot of particularly memorable imagery: a basket balloon, a castle-like fortress on a beach, chained gorillas in a dungeon, the lost treasure of Cleopatra, a very tall and eerie black man who can't speak because his tongue was torn out, a torture chamber with a stretching rack, a woman threatened with torture, a man jumping into a lake from the basket balloon, being chased by African natives with spears, cannibals, a shrunken head hanging on a rack, a fight with a medieval mace, a condor attack, having to dump priceless treasure overboard, and so on. Some scenes border on film mastery. For example, it is surprising how much tension could be put into a simple scene of a man gathering water at a river to take back to the balloon while the audience knows that cannibals are watching him from behind the coconut palms. The aerial photography is reasonably inspiring, although admittedly the filmed backdrop effects aren't high quality.

To clear up some common misperceptions: the basket balloon in the plot is actually a hydrogen balloon, not a hot air balloon. In the story, acid and water are carried on board to generate hydrogen, which is obviously dangerous and this fact figures into the plot since it is too dangerous for the balloon's occupants to fire the musket that they brought along, which leaves them largely at the mercy of attacking condors, spear-throwing African cannibals, and an unwanted guide. Also, the date of Friday, April 7, 1878 is shown at the beginning of this film, on the sign outside the lecture hall, so this is definitely not the medieval period.

The plot is solid and the imagery great. If only the acting and effects were improved, this could be an outstanding film.

While I agree with those reviews that found nothing redeeming in The Journey of the Lost Balloon, and am bemused by those that tried to find pieces of cheap quartz in the rough, the film was deeply offensive as it played on the long US history of pervasive, oppressive racism. That the balloon comes down in a jungle and a shoreline where black tribal people live merely sets up the writer and director to show people of color as ludicrous, repugnant, vicious, utterly brainless sub-humans. The clichés are unbearable to watch, including the cliché of the euro-guy outrunning the natives (ha!) and hiding in foliage that the dozen or so indigenous people (otherwise to be assumed as masters of their environment) entirely miss, and then, like dogs, run together after a stick the euro-guy throws to create a diversion. Add to this yet another white guy playing an East Indian named "Hindu" with brown-face on all but the back of his white neck, and we literally have a documentary of racist ideology paraded in minute detail over the course an entire film. Of course we don't want to make such films illegal, but we do want to create a culture where such films are not even imagined.

To the brown shirts who will counter that these were simply conventions of an earlier and more innocent time, we can only say that this tripe is the cultural flag that flies over such conventions as slave trade, slavery, the Klan, segregation, ghettoization, and mass incarceration. Of which, in addition to this film, the brown shirts are very proud.

Sorry, but this comment from another reviewer is simply wrong. The movie takes place in the Victorian age. I'm sure that the Middle Eastern settings for some of the adventures led that reviewer to believe that this took place in medieval times.

This is a better movie than you might think. It was intended for Saturday matinees and is basically an excuse for adventures on the African continent. Most kids who saw it at the time of its initial release loved it.

If you get a chance to watch it, give it a try.

** out of *****

You can prefer Irwin Allen's FIVE WEEKS IN A BALLOON more or less the same kind of plot but on a bit better scale though. This one which I speak about is a British production with some US director and actors too, and made by a US movie maker; however the result is spoiled by the fact that the feature is only available in pan and f...scan. I guess the genuine LBX material is lost for good, such a shame. Besides this, the result is OK for the whole family, as were EAST OF SUDAN and SIEGE OF THE SAXONS, also from Nathan Juran the director. Full of charm forever lost, that's the main intetest for this movie.

When talking about movies, there are many movies that seem like b-movies, movies of much lower production values than most. What is an example of a b-movie? Well, "Flight of the Lost Balloon" might fit the description of a b movie better than any other movie that I've watched.

The best part about it is the story. A man goes on a journey across Africa, mostly in a balloon, in order to find an explorer who went missing during a voyage. However, one of the occupants of the balloon takes control of the balloon in order to find a treasure, the same treasure the explorer was looking for. This sound like the plot of an at least above average movie, but every other aspect of the movie brings it down by a lot.

The sets look cheap and confined, the costumes and props look like something from a town's local stage play, the script is cheesy, the acting is even cheesier, the music is meh, sound effects get reused over and over again, the characters make stupid decisions, and the worst part of the movie was the special effects, which may contain the worst blue screen I've seen in a film. The shots of the condors look straight out of birdemic, and you can see unedited parts of the blue screen.

Overall, it's not that good of a movie, but I guess it's not all terrible. 4/10.