The Lost World (1925): watch the full film free, legally

Challenger’s expedition to the plateau

The Lost World is a 1925 American silent fantasy giant monster adventure directed by Harry O. Hoyt and written by Marion Fairfax. It adapts Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel of the same name. Wallace Beery plays the eccentric Professor Challenger, whose claims about surviving dinosaurs set an expedition in motion.

Paula White brings Challenger the journal of her father, explorer Maple White, who vanished during an expedition to a plateau on the borders of Peru, Brazil and Colombia. Its dinosaur sketches persuade Challenger that dinosaurs still live, and he makes the claim publicly at an academic meeting in London’s Zoological Hall. Ridicule follows. A newspaper offers to finance a mission to rescue Maple White, and Challenger reluctantly accepts.

The party includes Paula; Sir John Roxton, a sportsman; Edward Malone, a newspaper reporter and Roxton’s friend; the skeptical Professor Summerlee; the Indian servant Zambo; and Challenger’s butler Austin. Malone hopes the trip will impress his fiancée. At the plateau’s base, a rock is sent down at the party by an Apeman on an overhead ledge. Challenger then sees a Pteranodon eating a young Toxodon, confirming the journal’s account.

Zambo and Austin remain at camp while the others cross a chasm on a felled tree. A Brontosaurus knocks the tree away, stranding the explorers on the plateau. They encounter prehistoric creatures in violent struggles. An Allosaurus attacks a Trachodon and knocks it into a bog, then is driven away by a Triceratops. When the Allosaurus reaches the explorers’ camp, Ed drives it off by throwing a torch into its mouth.

Dinosaurs built through stop motion

Produced and distributed by First National Pictures, The Lost World was the first feature-length film made in the United States, and possibly the world, to use model animation as its primary special effect, or to use stop motion animation in general. Willis H. O’Brien created the pioneering effects. He had previously worked on the 1918 film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, which used stop motion photography.

O’Brien combined animated dinosaurs with live-action footage of people. Initially, this could be achieved only by dividing the frame into two parts, an approach also called split screen. His technique improved as the work progressed, allowing live action and stop-motion footage to appear in the same area of the screen. The film’s dinosaur designs were based on artwork by Charles R. Knight. Some of the dinosaur models later came into collector Forrest J. Ackerman’s possession.

Live-action river scenes used an open sewer behind the MGM studio in Los Angeles. Conan Doyle appears in a frontispiece to the film, though that material is absent from some surviving prints. Doyle frequently said that Professor Challenger, rather than Sherlock Holmes, was his favorite among the characters he created. In 1922, he showed O’Brien’s test reel to the Society of American Magicians, including Harry Houdini. The audience saw a Triceratops family, an Allosaurus attack and Stegosaurus footage. The following day, The New York Times described the creatures as “extraordinarily lifelike.”

Premiere, preservation and later response

The film had its world premiere at New York’s Astor Theatre on February 8, 1925. In April of that year, it became the first film shown to airline passengers, during an Imperial Airways flight from London to Paris. The screening took place on the Handley-Page O 400, a converted First World War bomber with a wood and fabric hull. Since film stock of the period was nitrate and highly flammable, the undertaking carried risk.

The Lost World received acclaim and has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 18 reviews, with an average rating of 7.5 out of 10. James Lowder reviewed it in White Wolf Inphobia #56 in June 1995, gave it 4 out of 5, and called O’Brien’s dinosaurs the film’s real stars. He singled out the stampede with its exploding volcano and wrote that the closing Brontosaurus sequence showed an influence on later monster epics.

In 1998, the Library of Congress selected The Lost World for the United States National Film Registry, calling it “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Restoration work has drawn on materials including Czech National Film Archive holdings, Kodascope prints, trailers, safety prints, 16 mm copies and an original 35 mm nitrate copy. A Flicker Alley 2K restoration included around eight minutes of recently discovered footage and a full orchestra score by Robert Israel.

Film details from the Wikipedia article “The Lost World (1925 film)”. Text adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0.