From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.movies
On Sun, 9 Oct 2022 08:25:11 -0700 (PDT), Mark Leeper
<
mleeper@optonline.net> wrote:
Six Lost Worlds: The Dramatic Adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Novel (film comments by Mark R. Leeper)
[Originally published in Argentus, Number 3, Summer 2003]
<snippo; I have a few remarks on the first two>
The silent 1925 version is, indeed, much closer to the book than the
1960 version, including the outer wrapper: the protagonist's going on
the expedition to impress his sweetie, only to find on his return that
she has married a bank clerk and her desire for a man of adventure was
merely a "girlish whim". And in other ways as well, as you noted.
It is marred by the dialog it assigns to Zambo, the comic relief, an African-American from the Deep South who is heavily stereotyped and,
for unexplained reasons, is somehow working in the Amazon.
But the stop-motion is, for its time, fantastic.
The 1960 version has a few problems. Unlike the 1925 version, where
the obligatory (in a movie) female member of the expedition is a
trained explorer herself, the female /here/ is very much a fluff-head.
The dinosaur action is, however, first-rate -- because (as you noted)
they are not stop-motion dinosaurs but lizards wearing costumes. I
don't recall if the film was monitored by an SPCA. Had they ditched
the costumes and modified the script to talk about "giant lizards"
instead of "dinosaurs", they would have avoided a lot of the
criticism. (I have read a suggestion that this happened because CB
DeMille was sucking all the special effects money out of the studio to
make /Cleopatra/, leaving O'Brien with few options.)
OTOH, the comic relief here is the storekeeper, and he is just a
greedy, grubby opportunist.
Incidentally, the DVD I purchased for /The Lost World/ contains both
versions. The 1925 version is 75 minutes long and claims to have been
restored from the original 35mm negative. In addition to telling you
this when the disc starts up, starting the movie tells it to you in
more detail before the actual film starts. The people who did this are
clearly proud of their work. This leaves it, what, 18 minutes short
(Maltin gives 93 minutes)? The disk also has 9 minutes of "Outtakes".
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."
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