The Lost World (1925)
An expedition led by the combative Professor Challenger sets out for a remote South American plateau where prehistoric creatures still live, and brings a captured brontosaurus back to London, where it escapes into the streets.
Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion dinosaurs made The Lost World the template for the effects-driven creature picture and pointed straight ahead to O’Brien’s work on King Kong; the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1998.
Background
The Lost World is based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, and it was a major showcase for Willis O’Brien, whose stop-motion animation brought the dinosaurs to life. O’Brien’s team built jointed models with rubber skins and moved them frame by frame. Wallace Beery plays Professor Challenger and Lewis Stone is the explorer Lord John Roxton. Some of the original footage has been lost, so surviving prints are shorter than the original release.
What to watch for
Watch the dinosaur scenes in particular. The movements of the creatures have a lifelike quality that was astonishing at the time, and the sequence in which a brontosaurus rampages through London is the highlight. O’Brien went on to work on King Kong in 1933, so this is an important step in the history of special effects. The plot is a fairly standard adventure, but it is the effects that made the film famous, and they are still impressive today. It joined the National Film Registry in 1998.
