Irwin Allen's
The Lost World (1960)

by Weltraumbesty / KRP, 8th of February 2012

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Playing as a sort of matinee-ready follow-up to 20th Century Fox’s successful Journey to the Center of the Earth from the year before, Irwin Allen’s The Lost World is big, colorful and dumb in more or less equal measure. The screenplay by Allen and frequent collaborator Charles Bennett (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), freely adapted from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel with some allusions to First National’s classic silent version thrown in for good measure, may propel Doyle’s early-century action into more modern times, but the film’s effects production remains positively prehistoric. This is perhaps the slurpasaur epic, second only to Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. in its wholesale embarrassment and abuse of large lizards and others of their ilk. It’s really a dreadful show by most measures, but Winton C. Hoch’s vivid CinemaScope photography and Allen’s own sense for pure stupid spectacle (this may be the genesis of his go-to suspense setup — the ledge) keep it from being a total bore.

The tale begins in London where, shortly after bopping bothersome American newsman Ed Malone (David Hedison, The Fly) over the head with an umbrella, the eminent and irascible Professor Challenger (the wonderful Claude Rains) heads to a meeting of the resident Zoological Society to make a shocking announcement: He has discovered an unscalable plateau hidden deep within the forests of the Amazon, a plateau populated by the living descendants of animals thought extinct since the Jurassic Age. In other words, “Live dinosaurs!”

With nothing to show for himself, his photographs and journals having been lost in an accident on the return voyage, Challenger proposes that a new expedition be mounted to his lost world, to be manned by himself, the ZSL’s own Professor Summerlee (Richard Haydn, well chosen as Challenger’s condescending professional rival) and two unbiased volunteers. Stepping up to the challenge are Lord John Roxton (Michael Rennie, The Day the Earth Stood Still), renowned big game hunter, explorer and philanderer, and, much to Challenger’s chagrin, reporter Ed Malone, whose boss immediately fronts $100,000 for the expedition’s expenses. With the money and team in order the trip into the Amazon begins, where its roster of personnel quickly bloats beyond all recognition. Aside from the necessary addition of helicopter pilot Gomez (Fernando Lamas!) the expedition takes on the useless and slimy local profiteer Costa (character player Jay Novello, wasted in his role) as well as Roxton’s headstrong love interest Jennifer Holmes (Jill St. John, Diamonds Are Forever) and her brother David, the two children of Malone’s wealthy news-baron employer.

Gorged on superfluous humanity, the Challenger expedition hobbles its way to the isolated plateau and, with its helicopter destroyed by a wandering brontosaurus (amusingly identified by Challenger without him having had an opportunity to see it), quickly becomes stranded there. Taking refuge in a spacious cave, the team members set out to investigate their surroundings and happen upon an example of native wildlife far more interesting than dinosaurs — prehistoric mini-dressed tribeswoman Vitina Marcus. Unfortunately her existence suggests that more of her kind are living on the plateau, and soon the expedition finds itself contending not only with dinosaurs and other giant flora and fauna, but a tribe of monster-worshiping cannibal natives as well…

While several oft-omitted elements of the original novel found their way into this The Lost World in heavily adapted forms, including subplots involving diamonds, a capture by natives, and even a dramatic conflict between Roxton and Gomez (in the novel this was the method by which the expedition was stranded, which was replaced by a brontosaurus in the 1925 film — this The Lost World keeps both), those hoping that Allen and Bennet’s writing might stick close to the source should look elsewhere. Indeed, the closest Allen’s production ultimately comes to honoring the author’s intentions is to put his name above the title card — which summarily bursts into flames. Perhaps the most grievous wound inflicted upon the material, besides the inclusion of one ‘Frosty the poodle’ in the character roster, is a love triangle revolving around the dull Jennifer Holmes and the backwards sexual politics that come along with it. The Lost World, like The Land Unknown, is another of those films in which a woman tries to prove herself in “a man’s world” only to be happily put in her place by the final reel. The overtly objectified Vitina Marcus doesn’t fare any better, being so much eye-candy that the film neglects to even name her. After an attempted rape by the sleazy Costa is thwarted young David pulls Marcus aside. “We’re not all like that,” he assures, before losing all credibility with his follow-up. “You know, you’re kinda nice!”

Ultimately more problematic than any of that is that Allen and Bennet have populated their The Lost World with such unlikable characters (…never mind that damned dog). It’s impossible not to like Claude Rains as Professor Challenger, miscast though he is in the role of the boorish and confrontational zoologist, and at least Gomez is granted a justifiable reason (the death of his beloved brother due to Roxton’s negligence) for being such a jerk. Otherwise this is pretty rough going, compounded by dishwater dull writing and Allen’s own uninspired direction. Seemingly at a loss for blocking the action in any interesting way, Allen resorts time and again to having his cast wander into a single and double-file lines to fill the expansive CinemaScope frame. Winton Hoch’s vivid photography helps to distract from some of the deficiencies, at least. Hoch had worked with Allen previously on The Big Circus, and would go on to photograph Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Five Weeks in a Balloon as well as episodes of several of Allen’s television series. More than just an award-winning director of photography, Hoch had helped to develop the three-strip Technicolor process as a lab tech in the 1930s. When it came to color on film he obviously knew his stuff, and in this respect The Lost World is no exception. It may be empty, but it is pretty.

Like the majority of Irwin Allen productions the issues of writing and characterization are all secondary to the big, dumb spectacle of the thing, and The Lost World has big, dumb spectacle to spare. Aside from the expected encounters with dinosaurs and cave-people Allen also treats audiences to one of his first daring ledge-walks (watch out for those obvious fall-away rocks!) as well as a climactic volcanic eruption, a gaggle of man-eating plants and one very large, very poorly composited giant spider. Though Willis O’Brien receives credit as an effects technician (just what he contributed, if anything, is unclear — sadly this appears to have been his final on-screen credit) his time-consuming stop motion animation process went unused here, and the dinosaurs were instead brought to life through the dubious slurpasaur technique. Used to reasonably good effect in Fox’s earlier Journey to the Center of the Earth and here managed by the same studio effects techs (L.B. Abbott, James B. Gordon, and Emil Kosa Jr.), The Lost World features monitor lizards, iguanas, alligators and geckos in a variety of rubber appliances. Though close inspection reveals the detail with which the technique was carried out (a lot of work went into matching colors, scale patterns and so forth) it never goes so far as to work. The best of efforts be damned, convincing an audience that a Nile monitor topped off with a floppy triceratops’ frill is anything other than what it looks to be is a losing proposition from the start.

The dependence on slurpasaur effects is the show’s greatest handicap, a fact owed less to their unbelievability than to the abject cruelty of it all. There’s little doubt in my mind that at least some of the costumed reptiles were outright killed for the production — one is sunk into a bubbling pool and doused with smoldering lava substitute, while an homage to the star dinosaur battle from One Million B.C. concludes with technicians hurling the participants over a ledge. These scenes were enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth even as a child, and certainly haven’t grown on me since then. Allen trotted out this dinosaur footage at every opportunity during his television career, from The Time Tunnel to Land of the Giants, and even re-cast Vitina Marcus in her familiar cave-girl role in Turn Back the Clock, a season one episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea that replays the events of The Lost World wholesale.

So what are we left with after all this? A well-shot, poorly conceived adaptation of a classic novel that’s loaded with unlikable characters and largely dependent on animal abuse for its thrills. This is one of those cases where I should by all rights hate the film, big and stupid and reprehensible as it can be, but for some intangible reason I don’t really hate Irwin Allen’s The Lost World at all. Faint praise to be sure, though contemporary audiences apparently agreed. While it received only middling critical attention the modestly budgeted The Lost World made plenty for both Allen and 20th Century Fox upon release, fast-tracking Allen’s far more substantial (if no less dumb) production of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and setting the stage for his successful stint as a producer of ‘60s fantasy television.

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~ Weltraumbesty / KRP

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