The LOST WORLD

   1) Film (1925). First National. Dir Harry O. Hoyt, starring Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Bessie Love, Lloyd Hughes. Script Marion Fairfax, based on The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan DOYLE. 9700ft (approx 105 mins, cut to 60 mins). B/w, with some tinted sequences.

   Wallace Beery makes an unlikely Professor Challenger in this slow-moving, wordy (a large number of dialogue frames) silent version of the famous novel about the discovery of an almost inaccessible South American plateau, a LOST WORLD in which prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and apemen, still live. The film is relatively faithful to the book, certainly more so than the 1960 remake (see below), though one departure occurs at the climax when the brontosaurus taken back to London by Challenger to confound the snooty doubters of the Royal Society breaks free and goes on a rampage that ends with the destruction of Tower Bridge (in the book it was a small pterodactyl that escaped), a forerunner of many sequences in later MONSTER MOVIES. The film is interesting chiefly because of its special effects,the work of stop-motion photography pioneer Willis H. O'BRIEN. It was the first feature film to make large-scale use of model animation combined with live action.

   2) Film (1960). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Irwin ALLEN, starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, Jill St John, David Hedison, Fernando Lamas. Screenplay Allen, Charles Bennett. 97 mins. Colour.

   This rather lifeless remake contains all the usual Irwin Allen banalities, with the customary reliance on spectacle to carry the film. The special effects, supervised by L.B. Abbott, are certainly spectacular; this time the various dinosaurs were portrayed using live lizards photographically enlarged, and their death throes, when the plateau is engulfed by volcanic fire, are alarmingly realistic.

   JB