I first encountered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD in the 1960 version with Michael Rennie, Jill St. John and Claude Rains. I was 8 years old and had yet to develop my fascination with silent movies. That would come a few years later. I first became aware of this movie’s existence when I saw some stills from it in a book. I remember reading that it was the work of the same man, Willis O’Brien, who had done the stop motion animation work on KING KONG and much later THE BLACK SCORPION, a movie that terrified me as a child..
I first saw the 1925 THE LOST WORLD in the 1997 Lumivision DVD of the George Eastman House restoration which ran for 64 minutes. Mine was actually the Slingshot DVD edition which went out of circulation fairly quickly. The picture quality was quite good complete with color tints. and it featured a serviceable synthesizer score. Of special note was the original cover art which spelled Doyle’s name D-O-Y-A-L. Later there were a bunch of very poor public domain copies which, like most PD copies, did not do the film justice.
Then in 2001 David Shepard and Film Preservation Associates premiered a 93 minute version featuring missing footage that came from an archive in the Czech Republic. This version, released by Image Entertainment, gave you not only the most complete version available but a choice of two soundtracks to choose from. A traditional one from Robert Israel and a more contemporary one from the Alloy Orchestra. This remained the definitive version of the film until this new Blu-Ray release although in 2007 20th Century Fox offered a fine copy of the George Eastman House version as a supplement to the DVD release of the 1960 film.
The story, for those not familiar with it, involves the discovery of live dinosaurs on a plateau in the jungles of the Amazon. A group of English explorers mount an expedition to bring back proof of the creatures’ existence but become trapped on the plateau after losing their only means of escape. The film stars Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger (one of his best remembered silent film roles), Bessie Love whose career stretched into the 1960s, and Lewis Stone years before he became Andy Hardy’s father.
This new Flicker Alley edition runs 103 minutes and includes more recently discovered footage. This version is a conflation of the several different existing prints which have been digitally scanned for the best possible image quality. It also has the original color tint scheme as well as some singular color highlights. Finally there is a fully realized orchestral score from Robert Israel that does the restored images justice. This is likely to remain THE definitive version for the foreseeable future. Finally fans of this “lost” classic can really rejoice.
For those of you who are new to the film it is important to place THE LOST WORLD into its proper 1925 historical perspective. The stop motion animation will certainly seem crude to some especially in today’s world of digital effects but they not only paved the way for KING KONG but show us how people in the 1920s envisioned dinosaurs. There is also a white actor in blackface with dialogue title cards to match which some today may find offensive but that was still a common practice at the time. In the bonus materials you will find an excellent commentary by Nicolas Ciccone that follows the film as it unfolds. There is also a booklet called SECRETS OF THE RESTORATION which is very informative. Another must have from Flicker Alley.
The Capsule Critic 