(Note:  This is the third and final article on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs' works translated into cinema.  You can read the first article, "The Land You Can't Forget," by clicking here, and the second article, "Rotten To The "Earth's Core," by clicking here.)

By DON MANKOWSKI

"Coming up from the beginning, the Caspakian passes, during a single existence, through the various stages of evolution, or at least many of them, through which the human race has passed during the countless ages since life first stirred upon a new world..."
                       --Tom Billings

While I’m not one of those weltschmertzers who bemoans being born in the wrong century, there was a time when I thought I’d emerged in the wrong decade. At least, that is, with regard to reading. Sometimes I felt: the Future's not what it used to be.

As a kid, I loved comic books, as what lad does not? I read every one I could get my hands on, but the best, far and away, were those older horror comics (i.e., the E.C.’s, like The Vault Of Horror, and a few others). These turned up now and again, but they weren’t published any more, and in fact, I wasn’t supposed to be looking at those anyway. With the wisdom of the ages, I understand now what was going on then (they’d been effectively banned), but then it was a mystery why all that was available was rather insipid.

In school, we were encouraged to read lots and lots. This was no problem for me. But what they gave us fell into two categories, namely The Classics and new stuff, Approved Reading.

The Approved Reading was awful, simply awful. It was written, probably by committee, for kids just like us, was contrivedly uplifting, and carefully screened of anything that could be offensive to anyone, anyone in the safe majority, that is. It was usually short and simple to read, but there was much of it. Every day our teachers extolled some wonderful story of the little boy who becomes a home run hero, or the little girl who has this great adventure, or this great biography of this great American. All of it was turned out by well-meaning hacks probably forgotten in a year or two, though their works would continue to haunt school libraries for decades to come.

The Classics were another thing altogether, but these were usually long and ponderous, reading that required thinking all the while. Of course, thinking while reading is required for serious adults, but hey, we kids are supposed to be learning to read, so why complicate it? I read just enough of things like Treasure Island and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to get by, and shunned these immediately after reporting on them or being tested on them. No way would I seek out stuff like that. I’m grateful too, because now I can turn back to The Classics, most of them anyway, and appreciate them in the proper light. But those that were forced upon me as a kid are forever ruined.

However, I had a secret weapon in the reading wars. Something far less ponderous and intimidating than The Classics, something far more interesting and involving that the Approved Reading. Its name was Edgar Rice Burroughs.

And yet, as I shall explain, this was the worst possible time to have discovered Burroughs! Following the author’s death in 1950, his heirs pretty much gave up on reprinting his books, probably because the Tarzan newspaper strips, comics, movies, lunchboxes, et c., et c. were a more reliable source of revenue. You couldn’t find the books anywhere. Everybody thought that Tarzan and Weissmuller were one and the same (and that Burroughs was somehow responsible for Weissmuller, I suppose).

But my father had been a devoted fan of the Burroughs books, and my mother helped me locate these dusty old volumes in grandma’s attic. The house doesn’t even exist anymore, but I will never forget that attic, accessed via a secret passage, no less! (Actually, it was a stairway reached through a closet in my grandfather’s bedroom). In the summertime, it might be 120 degrees with zero humidity. Harsh sunlight battled deep shadows. Everything there had a thin coating of sooty dust. The floorboards always creaked beneath your feet. Suits, coats and dresses loomed upon hangers, like judgmental phantoms of one’s ancestors. Trunks, boxes, bags were strewn about like pieces of a lost civilization, with those books the real treasures. It’s difficult to say how the circumstances of such a discovery will forever color one’s perception of the discovered, but they do indeed.

I was to learn that the immensely popular Tarzan was only one among many Burroughs heroes, and that his fantasy Africa was probably the least exciting of his many worlds. Staring back at me were titles like The Chessmen Of Mars, Pirates Of Venus, Synthetic Men Of Mars, The Moon Maid, and The Monster Men.

"Don’t start reading any of those until you’re ready," Dad warned me, "you won’t be able to stop reading." I took up the challenge, but he was right! (Looking back on things, I find that he usually was right, darn it.) I read all of the Burroughs books I’d found, one right after the other.

Inevitably, the end of my stash drew near; and in those days, who had the foggiest idea about how to get out-of-print books? Withdrawal loomed, but just about that time the copyrights lapsed on a few Burroughs titles due to carelessness by his heirs and their lawyers. The pressure of a few enterprising publishers--Ace, Ballantine, Canaveral and Dover--forced the heirs to reach agreements to bring back the books, and one could get them for forty or fifty cents apiece, about the price of a typical lunch in those days. Talk about a close call!

All of this encompassed but four or five years of my life, although it seemed a long time back then. I was to learn that Burroughs (1875-1950) had published the equivalent of about 70 novels, had been fantastically popular in the twenties, thirties and forties, and was just only developing a new following.

Burroughs’ 1918 pulp story The Land That Time Forgot described the strange adventures of a World War I German submarine that is misdirected to Caprona, a lost continent near the Antarctic. Aboard (through circumstances too complicated to explain) is American engineer Bowen Tyler.

Caprona (called Caspak by its inhabitants) is isolated from the rest of the world by barrier cliffs, but the interior is accessible via a subterranean passage. Tyler and an international party of Britons and Germans will discover that the peculiar landmass appears to support life at every stage of the planet’s evolution, including prehistoric beasts. Tyler is stranded in Caprona, if we are to believe the manuscript that he sealed in a thermos and flung from the highest cliff into the sea. (Edgar Rice Burroughs preferred to use first-person narration in his stories, and usually turned the recounting over to the putative hero after framing the tale. You can imagine how this device enhanced the escapism factor of a story intended for a pulp magazine audience, i.e., the young, and adults moderately educated at best.)

The second novella of the Caprona/Caspak Trilogy, The People That Time Forgot appeared in a 1918 issue of Blue Book Magazine. In it, the chronicler (presumably Burroughs himself) takes the Tyler manuscript, which was recovered off Greenland, to the man’s family. Tyler’s secretary, Tom Billings, mounts a rescue mission.

Billings reaches the lost continent via ship and manages to enter by flying an early aeroplane over the cliffs. The story follows Billings’ adventures traveling north through Caspak, in the company of Ajor, a beautiful savage woman. The story is the old one-darn-thing-after-another, with Billings surviving repeated attack of dangerous creatures solely due to his rifle and his trusty revolver.

What makes things interesting is that the lost continent is gradually (over the space of Burroughs’ three novellas) giving up its secret: namely that here evolution has taken a strange turn, with single individuals going through the entire process in a lifetime! That’s why I chose this exposition as my opening quotation, rather than one that describes a battle with a dinosaur. Man is defined by his weapons, and we observe a Band-Lu (spear man) evolve into a Kro-Lu (archer). Ajor happens to be a Galu (lariat person), the equivalent of a modern human of the outside world.

Billings and Ajor are trapped in a swamp and face death at the hands of the Kro-Lu and some renegade Galu. But, as things look bleakest, Bowen Tyler arrives with a host of Galu warriors to rescue Billings.

As I related in an earlier HORROR-WOOD article, the British studio Amicus released a film adaptation of The Land That Time Forgot in 1975, starring Doug McClure as Bowen Tyler. The screenplay followed the book with reasonable fidelity, but stressed action over exposition of the incredible evolutionary process, and compounded the felony with unconvincing mechanical monsters.

Amicus was back with the logical follow-up, The People That Time Forgot in 1977. Patrick Wayne (son of The Duke) played the Tom Billings character, but for some reason, the screenwriters renamed him Ben McBride. Intent upon rescuing Tyler, who has been missing a couple of years, McBride sails toward Caprona. Reflecting Seventies sensibilities, the screenplay adds a liberated female, Lady Charlotte "Charly" Cunningham (Sarah Douglas) to the rescue party. She’s a pants-wearin’, piece-packin’ news photographer whose paper helped fund the effort.

It’s circa 1918, and the depiction of the period isn’t bad. Major McBride then pilots a biplane with himself, Charly, naturalist Dr. Norfolk and co-pilot Hogan over the cliffs. The plane is damaged and forced to land after being promptly attacked by a pterosaur as big as the craft.

It is then that Ajor is introduced. She’s played by Dana Gillespie, and is an exotically lovely cavewomen. Her garb features highly inconvenient cleavage that I nevertheless find impossible to criticize. Ajor can communicate with the McBride party, having learned English from Bowen Tyler, and undertakes to lead McBride to him.

Surviving a few assorted monster attacks, the group is eventually surrounded by the Na-gas, a supposedly advanced race of masked warriors who turn out to be hideous. They plan to sacrifice Charly and Ajor to their deity. It is here that Bowen Tyler (McClure again) turns up as a grizzled captive, and it’s here that the script departs from the Burroughs original.

Lisa, Tyler’s girlfriend of the previous picture has also been killed, so we are told rather abruptly. Tyler will die as well; he receives a fatal arrow while buying time for the others to escape. This is a fate suffered by no other central Burroughs hero in memory (except for the narrator of The Moon Maid, who makes a career out of reincarnation.) Remember that the whole story was about rescuing Tyler. When it’s over, the survivors get to celebrate their own survival, which is okay, I suppose, but Tyler’s demise renders it all rather meaningless. If this qualifies as a "spoiler," they bloody well deserve it. (As we first see Tyler through the gaps in a skull, we should have written him off early!)

The earlier Amicus "Burroughs" films usually took an early credibility hit at the first appearance of an unconvincing monster. This was before the era of computer animation, and the most successful approach to depicting dinosaurs on screen was via elaborate models manipulated in time-consuming fashion and photographed a frame at a time. Cheaper alternatives involved photographing actors in suits, or perhaps real reptiles, and enlarging these via miniature sets or trick photography.

When producer Dino De Laurentiis mounted his infamous 1976 remake of King Kong, he announced to much publicity, that he’d be constructing--at great expense--a functional 40-foot robot gorilla to play Kong. This they did, but the results were so unconvincing that the robo-Kong appears in the finished movie for but a few, fleeting frames! Had it remained on view for an entire second, you’d see it for what it was. For the rest of his scenes, Kong was Rick Baker in his elaborate ape suit, enlarged via photographic tricks.

Amicus’ approach was similarly to employ life-size creature mock-ups. Their films didn’t have Kong’s budget, nor were their designs quite so grandiose in concept. Still, given the technology available, I believe that such attempts simply couldn’t succeed.

People’s pterosaur (an amalgam of a Pteranodon and a Rhamphorynchus) is probably the best monster effect of the whole series, and the stegosaur that follows is pretty good, too.

Pity that the effects crew found the range only as the series wound down to its most routine script. This is the only film in the series that didn’t carry ERB’s name above the title, and that’s indicative. Burroughs’ maniacal take on evolution is scarcely referred to, so that People is reduced to the level of your everyday dinosaur epic.

The cast is entirely adequate, and features a few Hammer film notables, like Thorley (Frankenstein Created Woman) Walters, Milton (Night Creatures) Reid and Dave (Horror Of Frankenstein) Prowse. McClure does well with a poorly-written death scene.

I’m not even sure this film had a theatrical release. If so, it must have been a limited one. I believe that the Amicus studio was foundering by then, as the film, although made by the usual suspects (producer John Dark and director Kevin Connor) bears American-International’s logo rather than theirs. I do recall that it had a prime-time network television debut circa 1980, when nearly every new film did, but suffered the indignity of being severely trimmed to fit into a 75-minute (including commercials) time slot for some reason or other.

Burroughs did give his readers one more adventure of Caspak in 1918, Out of Time’s Abyss. It concerns the adventures of John Bradley, a character introduced in Land. Separated early on from the Tyler party, Bradley will find himself on an island in Caspak’s inland sea, and have to escape from the Wieroo. These are an incredibly creepy race of winged men, evidently an evolutionary blind alley. The Wieroo build cities out of human skulls, and must abduct live-bearing Galu females to reproduce. Nasty enough for you?

Bradley, as written, is an interesting character, if only as a caricature of a staid Englishman. "Can’t waste ammunition" is his mantra, as he warns his men to steer clear of those bloody tyrannosaurs for this very reason. Abyss brings the story full circle back to the submarine that started it. Tyler, Billings, Bradley and their corresponding women will be reunited and depart the lost continent.

I don’t know if Amicus had any intentions of doing a third installment. Bradley (played by Keith Barron) is a supporting character in Land, and is not at all the leading-man type. Moreover, he’s missing and presumed dead at the end of that picture.

Dark, Connor and McClure teamed for one more lost-world adventure in 1978, Warlords Of Atlantis. It is clearly cut from the same cloth, but not attributed to any Burroughs story. I’m sure that they could have purchased one of ERB’s lesser, ambiguous titles (Beyond Thirty or The Land Of Hidden Men) and attached it, but I’m happy they didn’t resort to that. The film was neither well received nor long remembered.

The Amicus "Burroughs" films have retained a subdued popularity in the ensuing years, probably due to their mindless adventure, much as do the worst of the many bad Tarzan pictures. They probably could have played "kiddie" matinees forevermore, if indeed there still were such things. If you’re not familiar with Burroughs’ originals, you can probably enjoy these films at face value.

I salute the producers for keeping these as period pieces rather than updating the setting, and in striving to at least reflect the original plots. But they will always irritate me as a squandered opportunity. They’re probably the reason that we’ve had--with the arguable exception of Greystoke (1984)--no good Burroughs adaptations since.

The Amicus-A.I.P. "Burroughs" films:

1. The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
2. At the Earth’s Core (1976)
3. The People That Time Forgot (1977)

(Don Mankowski did just enough book reports on the classics and approved readings to finish school, was in fact a teacher himself for a time. Having done his best for the memory of Edgar Rice Burroughs, promises to let him rest until such time as someone makes a good film out of the master’s writings.)

Thanks, Don, for this third essay on the attempts of Amicus Studios to bring Edgar Rice Burrough's most important works aside from "Tarzan" to the screen.  People is a very good effort, so if you haven't seen this film, you really should give it a look.

Article copyright © Don Mankowski

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