The Lost World (1925)

No, it wasn't the release of Jurassic World that prompted me to watch the first dinosaur feature film ever. The AFI Silver Theater celebrated the latter's 90th anniversary with a screening and live expert musical accompaniment -- probably the best reason to watch a silent in a theater. Of course, the ticket costs about the same as a 3D movie ticket, so I won't blame you for declining the opportunity. But at least the standing ovation afterward doesn't feel as silly as applause at a regular screening.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle briefly appears at the beginning (the credits say "by himself" rather than "as himself"). A fairly famous other Arthur, Hoyt, gets a supporting role, his brother Harry O. being the director. The other likely familiar face is Wallace Beery, as the improbably named Professor Challenger.

One of my first impressions of TLW was that it's a precursor to King Kong. In the geographical ignorance of the 1912 story, the Amazon jungle -- said to be larger than all of Europe -- looks a lot like Skull Mountain Island minus the human natives. There's even a curiously belligerent sort of ape, albeit the size of a man. My Meetup group coordinator thinks TLW would've been just as famous as KK if only it weren't silent and largely, well, lost for a long time.

The audience chuckled several times early on at things that weren't supposed to be funny, along with a few that were. For the most part, it wasn't the then-revolutionary, Ray Harryhausen-inspiring stop-action animation; characters said and did some pretty stupid and/or jerkish things. For example, we can understand Challenger's excitement over his past discoveries, but he sucks at presentation and doesn't realize that rabid hostility to reporters doesn't help.

The main character of sorts is, aptly enough, a reporter, who volunteers only to impress a woman. If there's one thing I've learned from movies (cf. Swing Time and, much more recently, Stardust), it's that whenever a man goes on a quest to seal his engagement, he falls for another woman, but it turns out OK, because the first woman found someone else in the same period. In this case, the second woman is the daughter of an explorer who got separated from the rest of the previous expedition, so she hopes to find him.

And the dinosaurs? You won't find any "exotic" species among them, just allosaurs, pterodactyls, brontosaurs, and triceratops. They spend more time fighting each other than paying any attention to humans. The heroes face at least as much danger from the primordial environment. Plus the ape-man.

In fact, no humans get killed or badly hurt in the entire movie. Not that we see, anyway. If you crave violence and won't settle for only a saurian body count, move along.

There is one character in blackface. I have little idea why. He doesn't fulfill any stereotypes apart from being a sidekick. And again, he doesn't die.

Oh yeah: The reporter mentions that dinosaurs were thought to have gone extinct 10 million years ago. To anyone nowadays who doesn't measure the world's age in mere millennia, the estimate should be much higher.

I rather like these old-school boys' adventures. More recent attempts to recapture the feel generally fall short, possibly because they do more to excess (Peter Jackson would never settle for 106 minutes) and possibly because we're more forgiving of old-fashioned folly in genuinely old cinema. In any case, I can see why Doyle enjoyed some popularity unrelated to Sherlock Holmes.