From: psperson@old.netcom.invalid   
      
   On Sun, 9 Oct 2022 08:25:11 -0700 (PDT), Mark Leeper   
    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]   
      
      
      
   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."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)