The Lost World at 100
By Steven Sloss
“I have wrought my simple plan if I give one hour of joy,” muses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his filmed introduction to Harry O. Hoyt’s silent film adaptation of his own The Lost World, “to the boy who’s half a man or the man who’s half a boy”. Conan Doyle’s simple but sincere message to the audience – in what must surely be one of the earliest examples of a literary author being directly involved in a filmed adaptation of their own work – is one of adventure and mirth, a spirit that resonates throughout the picture itself. Arriving only thirteen years after the publication of Conan Doyle’s already-classic novel, Hoyt’s vision of The Lost World celebrates its landmark centenary in 2025 and remains – by far – the definitive filmed adaptation of the enduring story of exploration, discovery, and ill-gotten gain and glory.
1925 represented something of a banner year in silent cinema, with three era-defining giants – Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera – all releasing within the same year. With such iconic cinematic titans representing the year, it’s been easy for The Lost World to fall between the cracks – not unlike the hidden plateau of its title. Hoyt’s film is also universally (almost exclusively) cited as a precursor to 1933’s King Kong, which featured even more advanced stop motion-animated creatures from The Lost World’s special effects magician Willis O’Brien, developed from his own prior work on The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy and The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. The Lost World absolutely is a precursor to Kong, but it’s also much more and deserving of recognition and reverence for its own unique merits.
The film represents one of Hollywood’s first major special effects-driven blockbusters while it skillfully avoids the pitfalls that so many Western creature features fall into – namely, a sharp separation of special effects sequences and live action photography. This is largely achieved through O’Brien’s groundbreaking traveling matte technique, allowing the film’s cast to appear seamlessly in the same frame as miniature stop-motion monsters. The dinosaurs themselves – largely based on the pioneering paleo-art of Charles R. Knight – are a paleontologically retro delight, especially in the post-Jurassic Park era of increased demand for scientific accuracy in our big screen prehistoric pals. Scientific accuracy is undeniably an important academic pursuit, but I personally find it a bit more fun to travel back to a time when slender theropods stood upright and snarling, stocky sauropods craned their necks, both dragging their chunky, serpentine tails on the ground behind them.
The film’s most ambitious set piece depicts the eruption of a volcano in the titular prehistoric plateau, causing a mass stampede of dozens of dinosaurs fleeing for their lives alongside our human protagonists. O’Brien and assistant modeler Marcel Delgado masterfully achieve the painstaking illusion of multiple dinosaurs sharing the frame in constant and fluent motion, choreographed to perfection as well as any group of human actors. Allosaurs, Brontosaurs, Triceratops, and more charge side-by-side, all precisely animated in meticulous unison to portray a frenzied, panicked stampede through a crumbling world. O’Brien and Delgado don’t stop there, however, and arguably outdo themselves with the film’s thunderous finale.
Monsters had rampaged through major cities on the big screen before (notably in Winsor McCay’s surrealistic animated short Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Pet), but The Lost World features cinema’s first metropolitan giant monster rampage as we recognise them today. The monster in question is a Brontosaurus, brought back to civilisation as proof of his fantastic stories by Wallace Beery’s larger-than-life Professor Challenger. After a mishap unloading the creature at an unnamed London dock, the monster breaks loose and sets its sights on the Big Smoke, culminating in the collapse of Tower Bridge. Suffice to say, the image of an ancient, primordial leviathan – unsusceptible to reason and unconstrained by modernity – indiscriminately laying waste to man’s dominion and self-congratulatory monuments remains an evergreen image of fantastic cinema 100 years after The Lost World debuted, with many subsequent depictions directly owing their imagery to Hoyt’s film.
The loss of pride in the destruction of London as depicted in the film is apt for a picture released in 1925. That same year, New York expanded to become the most populated city in the world, an achievement London had claimed for over a century prior. The Square Mile was no longer the world capital of commerce, trade, art, and exhibition, and a rampaging prehistoric beast laying waste to some of the city’s most prominent boroughs and landmarks – even in a work of fiction playing out on a screen before an audience – would represent yet another blow to the proud metropolis. Ironically, Tokyo – another city known to fall victim to giant monster attacks – would take the populace crown from New York in the 1960s.
The Lost World is not without its flaws. For a film now 100 years old, symptoms of age are to be expected. Chief among these is a gruesomely racist performance by Jules Cowles in full blackface in the role of “Zambo”, complete with horrendously accented intertitles. The film also repeats a fatal flaw of Conan Doyle’s text, with journalist Ed Malone (wet sponge Lloyd Hughes) serving as the protagonist over the brash, bullish, Brian Blessed-esque, and infinitely more interesting Challenger. Marion Fairfax’s script makes some smart changes too, though. The race of ape-men that populate the Lost World in Doyle’s text are consolidated into a single and extremely menacing missing link, who eerily stalks our party of explorers throughout the picture. The villainous beast is portrayed by the fabulously named Bull Montana in impressive and still highly effective full-body makeup. Additionally, the prolific Bessie Love (whose later credits would include On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Sunday Bloody Sunday, and The Hunger) appears as newly created character Paula White, providing a much-needed feminine presence in the otherwise overtly machismo expedition.
The Lost World debuted to much fanfare and acclaim at the Astor Theatre in New York on 8 February 1925, instantly becoming a runaway success and a landmark title in the history of cinema. The film paved the way not only for King Kong (in which several sequences from The Lost World are closely restaged) but the entire monster movie sub-genre as it exists today. Without the pioneering special effects and much-imitated narrative of Hoyt and O’Brien’s The Lost World, it’s very likely the landscape of popular cinema would look very different today – an achievement worth celebrating an entire century later.
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