"When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned The Lost World, an evergreen novel of adventure...the concept of humans contending with prehistoric beasts was thus not the tired theme that decades of Grade B (and alas, Grade Z) productions have made it..."

When it comes to dinosaurs rampaging on screen, it didn't start with Jurassic Park.  In fact, it didn't start with King Kong.  It actually all began with a silent film that featured groundbreaking special effects.  It's the story behind...

By DON MANKOWSKI

(Note: This is the first installment of a two-part article on the spawn of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's seminal fantasy novel, The Lost World.  The second installment will thunder across the veldt next month.)

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man
Or the man who’s half a boy.

Dinosaurs.

Children are fascinated by dinosaurs. Boys, anyway, and often it lasts a lifetime. It must seem as if they’ve always been around!

Well, of course they’ve always been around, were around a hundred million years before you or I were around! Their fossil record. however, wasn’t uncovered until very late in the nineteenth century, and the general public knew very little about the "terrible lizards" in 1912.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned The Lost World, an evergreen novel of adventure that year, the concept of humans contending with prehistoric beasts was thus not the tired theme that decades of Grade B (and alas, Grade Z) productions have made it. Dr. Conan Doyle (1859-1930) got there first. He prefaced the story with that charming verse at the top of this essay.

Not very long ago in these electronic pages I referred to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan as "arguably the most popular fictional character ever." I hedged because another persuasive argument can be made on behalf of Doyle’s own Sherlock Holmes, who’s been around a generation longer.

Doyle, an Irish physician, was a respected British patriot knighted in 1902, ostensibly for his journalistic work during the Boer War, and not for Sherlock Holmes--although King Edward VII was reportedly a fan of the Holmes mysteries. While I suspect that I’ll one day be writing about the redoubtable Mr. Holmes here, I must tell you that The Lost World focuses upon another inspired creation of Sir Arthur’s, Professor George Edward Challenger.

Challenger is brilliant, but abrasive and belligerent. He’s broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, big-headed, bacon-faced, bushy-bearded, bellow-voiced--and I’m only up to the letter "b." In short, there’s nothing modest about Challenger.

It has been said that Sir Arthur, a big bear of a man himself, modeled Challenger’s physical appearance upon his own, though the author was known to be gentle and amiable, more like Dr. Watson than Dr. Challenger.

The Lost World relates the adventures of Professor Challenger on an expedition to an almost inaccessible plateau in the South American jungle. Stranded there, his people encounter prehistoric beasts, primitive humans and ape-people. They finally manage a return to London, where a pterosaur they brought back escapes and briefly causes a panic.

Doyle would use Professor Challenger in two more short novels and a pair of short stories. In his twilight years, the author endorsed such nonsense as communication with the dead and the photography of fairies and ghosts. Whereas Sherlock Holmes remained forever rational ("The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply"), Challenger became involved with Spiritualism, as did his creator. Looks as though George Edward and not Sherlock was the favorite son. (Indeed, Doyle more than once donned fake beard and eyebrows to impersonate Challenger for photographers.)

Enter Willis O’Brien (1886-1962). Using clay models of dinosaurs, O’Brien had turned out a few short films using a truly revolutionary technique: stop-motion animation. He would pose his model and then expose a frame of film. That’s one frame, a mere 1/24th of a second! Then, he’d subtly alter the pose, shoot another frame...and repeat the process. After a day’s work, he had a few seconds of footage once the film was projected at its usual speed. (I don’t even want to think about the patience that this would require!)

In 1925, First National enlisted O’Brien’s expertise for a film version of the popular novel, adapted by Marion Fairfax and directed by Harry O. Hoyt. O’Brien built small articulated skeletons and fleshed these out with rubberized skin. He would then use static and traveling matte processes to combine his animated models with the live actors from different shots in deceptive size relationships to startling effect, as the tiny models appeared to tower over the humans.

Reporter Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes) needs a big story to impress his fiancé. He finds it in the second Challenger expedition, although he has to risk his life even to earn a place in the ranks: Professor Challenger (film legend Wallace Beery) is fond of beating up newsmen who invade his privacy, as he will prove in a wrestling match with Malone.

The expedition consists primarily of Challenger, Professor Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt), Sir John Roxton (Lewis Stone), and Paula White (Bessie Love). Paula is an added character, a romantic concession, the daughter of Maple White, himself an explorer lost on the earlier expedition. A notebook kept by Paula shows sketches of an Allosaurus and Brontosaurus, Jurassic beasts both, reasonably close to their actual size (the drawing shows a man for scale). In later efforts, filmmakers would exaggerate.

Challenger’s Lost World is set upon a plateau hundreds of feet high, with un-climbable cliff walls. From the base, the party is astonished to witness a flying pterosaur capture and devour a small furry animal. Only via a detached pinnacle with some slope to one side can the geological structure be ascended. Our adventurers cross from pinnacle to plateau using a felled tree as a bridge.

Once there, they spot a long-necked brontosaur. Now, just about every dinosaur flick will emphasize that the herbivorous dinosaurs are harmless, though they might weigh, oh, 30-odd tons, because they had no interest in eating you. Challenger quite rationally points out that although this species is content to eat leaves it could cause harm by trodding upon someone. (Hell, I once had a dog--maybe a hundred pounds, absolutely no interest in eating me--that was downright dangerous when he happily greeted you.)

Then, for no apparent reason, the thunder lizard wrecks the tree-bridge, thus stranding the party on the plateau! He was dangerous after all. (Though it was applied to probably the best-known dinosaur of all for decades, Brontosaurus is an archaic name. Due to long-established rules of nomenclatural priority, that beast is known today as Apatosaurus.)

By this time, plotting gives way to more dinosaurian thrills. A carnosaur slays a duckbilled dinosaur. Challenger tells us that the predator is "an Allosaurus, a meat-eater--the most vicious pest of the ancient world." Vicious pest, that’s what the title-card says: you do know that this is a "silent" picture, right? There are several more dinosaurian battles, even as a scuttling ape-man stalks the party as they try to devise an alternate escape.

Added for the film version, is a climactic volcanic eruption and subsequent fire, with an incredible dinosaur stampede! (It’s a bit hard to take, when a world that’s been stable for tens of millions of years suddenly self-destructs without any appreciable cause, but remember, it wasn’t a cliché the first time.)

The Challenger party escapes via rope ladder carried up by a determined pet monkey, thus relying upon reverse evolution. Malone and Paula are a couple, as Roxton gallantly steps aside. A brontosaur fallen from the plateau to soft landing in the mud far beneath will accompany them back to London as evidence.

Of course, once back in London, the brontosaur escapes, destroys a few hallowed structures such as London Bridge, and swims to oceanic liberty (and presumed oblivion) along the Thames! Good finish! The End.

True, the early animation is just a bit clumsy by later standards, but the slightly jerky quality imparted the live action scenes by the early cameras tends to mask this.

Frankly, O’Brien’s not-quite-extinct beasts have a lot more personality than most of the human cast. There’s a very motherly Triceratops, who does battle with a nasty attacking Allosaurus. As the horned dinosaurs were Cretaceous (rather than Jurassic) fauna, this is something of a blunder, but O’Brien does make the allosaur correctly smaller than his infamous descendant, Tyrannosaurus rex. O’Brien’s dinos breathe (via balloon bladders), sneer, roll their eyes, scratch themselves, lick their paws and bleed when wounded! O’Brien refined his techniques for King Kong (1933), which film ought to assure his place in history.

Kong is essentially an enhanced remake of The Lost World, and is still regarded by many as the greatest fantasy-adventure ever. Nevertheless, O’Brien went on refining his techniques for the remainder of his life, with Son Of Kong, The Animal World, The Black Scorpion and other films.

Wrestler-actor Bull Montana isn’t quite Lon Chaney, but his menacing monkey-man gives the expedition some trouble, raining boulders down upon them. The human cast hasn’t much to do other than react once the dinosaurs are stealing the scenes. A particular embarrassment is a white actor in blackface delivering comic "darky" dialogue. It would have been rather easy to at least produce politically correct title cards, but then film historians would howl. The Doyle book is pretty chauvinistic in it’s own White-Man’s-Burden right, but this character was in fact contrived anew.

Though a popular film upon its release, The Lost World suffered the fate of most silent films once sound films took over. It was treated as a novelty item and exhibited in severely truncated form until mostly restored in the 1990s, in nicely tinted prints. (The advent of green announces the jungle — London has been blue or white. The volcanic fire scenes are vivid red.) There’s really nothing special in the acting or dialogue, but in this case the special effects can truly carry the day.

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that Sir Arthur showed some of the dinosaur footage to a notoriously skeptical friend of his, claiming that the scenes involved photography across time. The friend, Harry Houdini, one of the greatest illusionists of history, was unable to explain or debunk the amazing shots.

Lost World lost, Lost World regained. But there’s another story...

(Don Mankowski continues to contribute to Horror-Wood, assured by Editor Renfield that he too will be eventually knighted by our Queen for his efforts. Please don’t tip him off, but do check out his modest Web page for other works.)

Thanks, Don!  Like you, we're happy to tip our hat to the wizard named Willis O'Brien and to the film that started the whole big-lizard genre.  The original The Lost World is now out in a beautifully restored version and we urge our readers to check it out.

Article copyright © Don Mankowski

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