Pre-War Thrills: The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

A title card at the very start of Tod Browning’s ‘The Unknown’ informs us that, “this is a story they tell in Madrid… it’s a story they say is true”. I have no idea whether or not the genesis of ‘The Unknown’ actually lay in such folkloric roots (somehow I doubt it), but it wouldn’t seem an unreasonable assumption, given that, over ninety years later, the story Browning and Waldemar Young concocted here remains one of the most extraordinary tales ever put on screen. (1)

This is the kind of perfectly formed yarn – rich in unfeasibly circular dramatic ironies and almost unbearably bleak melodrama - that one could easily imagine enthralling audiences in pretty much any era or context, whether presented through the lips of some soused storyteller in a disreputable Castilian bar, dramatised for the Elizabethan stage… or indeed adapted into a motion picture.

Even if you’ve never seen ‘The Unknown’, if you’ve been reading around the subject of old movies or horror films for a few years, you probably will have encountered some writer or other gleefully summarising the film’s storyline, and thought to yourself, “wow, that sounds like one crazy movie, I should definitely track it down”, or words to that effect.

Indeed, such is the ingenuity of ‘The Unknown’s scenario that it is practically impossible to write about the film without immediately lapsing into ‘plot synopsis’ mode. Whilst I normally try to avoid this in my reviews, hearing the story of this one recounted never fails to make me happy, so in this case I’m more than happy to follow suit. (Perhaps I should have added “some chancer writing about movies on the internet” to my list above?)

So, settle in folks - it’s story time. (If you’d rather not have the plot details of a near century old movie spoiled for you, please skip to the end of the italics below.)

Alonzo (Lon Chaney Sr.) is an armless gypsy knife thrower employed by Zanzi’s Travelling Circus. As part of his act – memorably portrayed in the film’s opening scene – Alonzo uses his feet to hurl knives and fire bullets at the circus owner’s beautiful daughter Nanon (a twenty-one year old Joan Crawford). As is traditional, Nanon is tied to a wooden wheel for this performance, and Alonzo lets his projectiles pass so close to her body that that her dress is cut off, leaving her exposed in a delightful flapper-era bathing costume.

As it transpires, Alonzo is desperately in love with Nanon, making his feelings so plain that her father, Zanzi, is inspired to viciously beat him, insisting that he does not wish to see his daughter subject to the amorous intentions of a ‘freak’.

Nanon herself however sees things a little differently. Opening her heart to Alonzo, she confesses that, “..all my life men have tried to put their beastly hands on me... to paw over me. I have grown so that I shrink with fear when any man even touches me.”

As a result of this implied abuse in early life, Nanon has developed a pathological fear of men’s arms, and as such feels herself condemned to a life of loneliness. When Malabar (Norman Kerry), the circus’s lovably hapless strongman, tries to woo her (encouraged by Alonzo’s duplicitous, faux-brotherly advice), she flees from his muscular embrace as if he were a grotesque monster, subsequently weeping for her inability to accept his love.

“You are the only man I can come to without fear,” Nanon tells Alonzo, and, armed with this knowledge, you’d think our hero’s chances for romance would be looking pretty good… but unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that.

You see, Alonzo does actually still have his arms, and furthermore, they’re still attached to him too. He keeps them hidden, tied across his torso in a constrictive leather corset - a deception he has devised in order to distract attention from his former (or perhaps continuing?) life as a thief, gangster and (so it is implied) a serial strangler. (2)

Alonzo’s only genuine physical deformity in fact is a vestigial second thumb on his left hand – an additional digit that would no doubt have brought a swift end to his strangling career, were it not for his armless disguise.

As Alonzo’s loyal dwarf servant Cojo (John George) points out to his master, the moment Nanon embraces him, she will feel the shape of his arms and learn his dark secret – a possibility rendered all the more disastrous by the fact that Alonzo has by this point throttled her father to death in order to stop him standing between them. (3)

As a result of this rash action, the circus has been forced to shut down by its deceased owner’s creditors, and, more pertinently, the police are leaving no stone unturned in their hunt for the mysterious killer with an extra thumb. (To add an extra frisson to the murder scene, poor Nanon actually sees the mutated fingers that put an end to her father through a caravan window, missing a fatal glimpse of Alonzo’s face by mere seconds.)

So, it’s quite a pickle for old Alonzo. He determines however that, whatever happens, he cannot live without Nanon’s love, and so resolves to take drastic action. Never a man to do things by half measures, he tracks down a crooked surgeon whom he had previously met through his contacts in the criminal underworld. By threatening to expose the doctor’s nefarious activities, Alonzo persuades him to carry out a fairly extreme form of elective surgery, the nature of which you can probably guess.

Whilst Alonzo is busy recuperating from this (no doubt pretty traumatic) operation however, Nanon and Malabor are left kicking their heels in the town in which the circus made its last stop, where the strongman is making plans for a spectacular new stage act.

In Alonzo’s absence, Nanon feels herself increasingly drawn to the blandly good-natured Malabar, to the extent that she eventually overcomes her revulsion toward his arms and succumbs to his naively chivalrous advances.

Falling head over heels, the couple vow to marry as soon as possible, but agree to put off the big day until their good friend Alonzo – whom they respectively regard as a protector and a kind of benevolent uncle figure, unaware of his inner torment – has returned from wherever he’s gone to, in order that he may share their happiness by witnessing their union.

[Dramatic pause.]

So yes -- you’d perhaps be forgiven for not feeling much sympathy for Alonzo up to this point, but… Jesus Christ, surely no one deserves a fate like this, even if it’s largely the result of his own cracked decision-making and generally nefarious behaviour. How many characters can you think of - outside perhaps of the realm of some particularly obscure and blood-thirsty ancient mythology – who have been driven to cut off their arms in the name of love, only to find themselves cuckolded?

As you might well have expected, the reunion between Alonzo and his friends is far from a happy one, and the lengths Browning goes to to draw out his protagonist’s gradual realisation of the awful truth still stands as one of cinema’s most excruciating demonstrations of emotional sadism.

But, I’ll leave my plot synopsising there for the moment, merely noting that, in case you were wondering how a story like this could possibly end, well… as it happens, Malabor’s new stage act involves him testing his strength by harnessing his arms to two horses galloping in opposite directions on mechanical treadmills. What would happen if something went wrong with the treadmills, Alonzo asks him. Why, my arms would be torn from their sockets, he cheerily responds. It’s all just too beautiful.

For those who have taken the time to approach Tod Browning’s work from an auteurist perspective, ‘The Unknown’ can’t help but stand out as something of a Rosetta Stone in his surviving catalogue, despite the truncated fifty minute run time of the surviving print.

With its lovingly realised circus milieu, its fascination with physical deformity, its bottomless reserves of melodramatic perversity and its deployment of enough overlapping layers of castration anxiety to give a convention of Freudians a collective migraine, this is about as thorough an exploration of what are generally considered the director’s ‘key themes’ as could possibly be wished for. (4)

Browning may never have been much celebrated as a cinematic stylist, but the surviving cut of ‘The Unknown’ is nonetheless a model of narrative efficiency, hitting each and every beat it needs to to tell this story well, with the director’s talent for ensuring his imagery hits hard when it needs to in full effect throughout.

As you’d expect given his background and recurrent interest in such subject matter, Browning has a wonderful feel for the romanticism of the gypsy travelling show setting (in particular, the male characters all look really f-ing cool in their wardrobe of paisley bandanas, gaucho riding gear, hoop earrings and wide black hats), and the mixture of set and matte painting that creates the opening establishing shot of the circus exterior is a very impressive bit of work (blink and you’ll miss it).

Elsewhere, the extremely high ceilinged, brightly lit operating theatre set makes for a striking contrast to the sawdust-floored rural environs of the rest of the picture, momentarily recalling the kind of sinister, modernist interiors filmmakers like Fritz Lang were cooking up on the other side of the Atlantic, and the staging of Malabar's big stage act during the finale is absolutely extraordinary.

Complete with the sight of a scantily-clad Crawford standing atop a podium, gleefully whipping the seemingly gigantic white horses (directly recalling Alonzo's earlier confession that “it was just something in [my heart] that stung like the lash of a whip” as he struggles to explain his extreme reaction to discovering she and Malabar are lovers), I think this would remain unrivalled as a deranged spectacle of implied S&M until Alejandro Jodorowsky took elements of this story to even wilder extremes in ‘Santa Sangre’ (1989).

There are a few eccentric stylistic choices elsewhere (the curious decision to shoot several scenes through what looks like sackcloth is often mentioned), but for the most part, the remainder of the film is very plainly presented. I’m pretty sure the camera remains static throughout, and likewise, the editing of the narrative is strictly linear in its presentation, with master shots, two shots, shot/reverse shots etc all handled strictly by the book.

Nonetheless though, this grounded/fixed perspective allows Browning’s close ups and tableaux to achieve an intensely vivid pictorial quality that is often captivating. Like good paintings, these shots carry within them a depth of feeling that heightens the film's emotional power immensely.

Such is the ingenuity of the story Browning and his collaborators have devised here, I’m tempted to say it would have been difficult for them to go wrong however they chose to frame the action, but perhaps even more crucial to the success ‘The Unknown’ is its casting.

Had merely adequate performers been cast in its central roles, it is likely ‘The Unknown’ would never have risen above the level of a particularly bizarre theatrical melodrama, forgotten by all but a handful of silent/pre-code era archivists and fanatics. With Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford on hand however, it’s a whole different story… and not merely on account of their (contemporary or subsequent) fame either.

Crawford’s performance, it must be said, is excellent. Such is the strength of her presence on screen that it feel entirely believable that a man of Alonzo’s wide and bitter experience should become obsessed with Nanon, even as her damaged, brittle mannerisms simultaneously provide a surprisingly raw portrayal of an abused/victimised woman for this era of cinema; “Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” she exclaims in impotent fury after Malabar initially tries to embrace her.

And, speaking of Malabar, even Norman Kerry acquits himself well here, despite initially seeming lined up to be a complete waste of space. Blank-eyed, empty-headed and perpetually grinning, he provides a complete contrast to the ancient, deep red claret of Alonzo’s uniquely troubled character, making us feel our anti-hero’s humiliation all the more keenly once he discovers he has lost out in love to the human equivalent of an unflavoured biscuit.

Mainly though, we need to talk about Lon Chaney.

It may have become a bit of a truism to point out that silent film acting is a different beast from sound acting, but rarely has that point been more clearly demonstrated than by Chaney’s performance in ‘The Unknown’.

In a sound context, his facial gymnastics and heavily made up features would have been regarded as intolerably OTT, but, denied a voice, it is through these kind of gestures that silent characters gain live – and all the more so when they’re even denied the use of their arms for most of the picture. The way that Chaney methodically builds Alonzo up as a character, entirely through his facial tics and eye movements, his mode of dress, his sudden shivers and lunges, is absolutely remarkable. (5)

The figure of the “sympathetic monster” would of course go on to become a cornerstone of American horror cinema as it developed through the rest of the 20th century, but in ‘The Unknown’ Chaney delivers a very different, and considerably more challenging, recipient of our sympathies from the kind of sad-eyed, agency-fee automatons derived from the lineage of Conrad Veidt’s Cesare, Paul Wegener’s Golem and, eventually, Karloff’s monster and it’s descendants.

Unlike those critters, Alonzo is unambiguously a villain – one who neither seeks nor receives any pardon for his maleficence. A criminal, liar and murderer, he cheats, deceives and manipulates everyone he meets through the course of the film, including the woman he professes to love. He upturns the foundations of the essentially benign world in which the drama begins, brings doom upon his own head with admirable efficiency, and basically behaves in the most tyrannical manner imaginable. And yet…

Scanning reviews online, I have often seen ‘The Unknown’ described as a “classical tragedy”, but in reality Alonzo represents something closer to the opposite of a conventional tragic hero. Rather than noble character with one fatal flaw, Chaney presents Alonzo as a tangled mass of flaws and neuroses, from behind which a redeeming spirit of nobility somehow still shines, daring us, for want of a better word, to feel love for him, as well as pity.

It is possible that Vincent Van Gogh’s infamous sacrifice of his ear may to some extent have distantly inspired the story of ‘The Unknown’, and I would go so far as to say that Chaney imbues Alonzo with what I can only describe as an ‘artistic’ sensibility. We don’t doubt for a second the sincerity of Alonzo’s love for Nanon, even as we recognise that his ability to differentiate reality from fantasy hangs by the very thinnest of threads.

Rather than just an intimidating heavy, he serves as a rich, over-powering presence in the lives of the younger characters, giving generously of himself, in spite of the self-interested machinations cloud his honesty. He may, we swiftly learn, be more or less insane, but his is not the kind of insanity that can easily be written off, and his companionship with both Nanon and Cojo (even with Malabar) is seen to be real and compassionate, even as his conduct is shaded by a strain of misanthropy that we feel is birthed more from bitter experience than from mere ingrained nastiness. (“You are wise, Nanon”, he says early on the film when Crawford confesses her hatred of men’s touch, “always fear them, always hate them.”)

Chaney’s big moment of course is Alonzo’s post-amputation reunion with Nanon and Malabar. This takes place - where else - on the stage of a theatre, and, as noted, is handled by Browning as a scene of excruciating emotional torture, extended well beyond the point of audience discomfort.

Shock, frustration, sorrow, rage, menace, terror, hysteria, despair, self-hatred and all-out howling madness - all of these are powerfully felt as they shift, meld and mutate across Alonzo’s visage in what amounts to a harrowing tour de force of silent emotional devastation. It may seem melodramatic to speak of seeing a man's heart smashed into a million pieces live on screen, but you'll feel pretty sure you know what that looks like after watching Chaney here.

In fact, the only rationale I can think of for this film being named ‘The Unknown’ relates to the unimaginable combinations of errant emotions that Chaney manages to dredge up here, verging into states of being that remain entirely nameless, and concluding only when he works himself up to the point of seizure.

“I'm all right now,” an inter-title assigned to Alonzo reads just a few a few moments later, as he regains his composure, his mask back in place and his plan of vengeance already taking shape.

Before watching ‘The Unknown’, I’d always assumed Chaney’s “man of a thousand faces” legend was coined in reference to the effects he achieved with his famous make up box, but, from watching his performance here, it’s clear he could cycle through those faces live in front of the camera with the ease of a martial arts star demonstrating his/her training moves. It is an incredible sight to behold – perhaps the very zenith of a form of acting that would be rendered obsolete mere months after this film’s release.

I had been all set to herald Alonzo as the progenitor of his own lineage of doomed, sociopathic anti-heroes within horror cinema, but, to be honest, I can think of very few characters within the genre who actually lived up to the example Chaney sets here. Peter Lorre’s Dr Gogol in Mad Love perhaps comes closest, with Karloff’s Imhotep in ‘The Mummy’, Price’s Phibes and Usher, and perhaps an unusually affecting mad scientist turn here and there all lurking distantly in the background – but really, Alonzo the Armless stands alone.

We will never really know how Chaney might have adapted to the coming of sound, but, as far as America’s silent cinema goes, he remains a performer without peer, and ‘The Unknown’ is perhaps his strongest surviving vehicle. An unforgettable viewing experience, it is not so much ‘haunting’ in the genteel sense of the ghosts more commonly encountered in the era’s mystery stories, but a raw, emotional wound of a picture that lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave you be, like a scab you just can’t help but scratch.

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(1) Browning and Young respectively take credit for “story” and “scenario”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, in addition to which we should also mention Joseph Farnham, whose work on the text for film’s inter-titles is wonderful. We should note at this point that various online sources claim that ‘The Unknown’ was adapted without credit from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1915 novel ‘K’. As I can’t find a detailed plot synopsis of the novel though, and certainly can’t be bothered to track down a copy and read it, I’ll have to refrain from further comment on this for the time being.

(2)If the precise details of Alonzo’s criminal career remain frustratingly vague, this seems to be due to the fact that no less than fourteen minutes of footage, reportedly dealing largely with this subject, have been excised from all surviving prints of ‘The Unknown’, and are now – tragically - assumed lost.)

(3) Browning’s notorious ‘Freaks’ (1932) - which, as you will have surmised, directly rehashes a few key plot elements from ‘The Unknown’ – may be similarly personal, and similarly memorable, but for my money the earlier film is by far the greater achievement. (More on this perhaps when I get around to reviewing ‘Freaks at some point in the future.)

(4) If you’re thinking that actor John George looks a bit familiar, that’s probably due to the fact that he appeared in upwards of two hundred Hollywood productions prior to his death in 1968, and, as was so sadly often the case for dwarf actors, suffered the indignity of going uncredited in almost all of them. Such is the range of his filmography, chances are you must have seen him in something over the years, although oddly enough he apparently didn’t appear in ‘Freaks’, which you’d think would have been a shoe-in given his work for Browning here.

(5) I was originally going to take some time here to lavish further praise upon Chaney for his astonishing dedication to this role vis-a-vis learning to drink wine, smoke cigarettes, wipe his eyes with a handkerchief and throw knives, all using his feet. I have read elsewhere however that at least some of these accomplishments were doubled for Chaney by Paul Desmuke – a genuine armless man apparently famed for his performances on the violin.

Although we ostensibly see Chaney perform out these actions in single shots with his face clearly visible, after watching the film again I can’t rule out the possibility that some of them may have been cleverly faked – eg, with Desmuke concealed beneath a table, or just out of frame, extending his legs upward toward Chaney’s face.

Given that there is almost certainly no one left alive who can give us a definitive answer either way though, I didn’t want to clog up the main text of the review with such conjecture. Naturally I’d love to believe that it was Chaney himself getting busy with his feet (as if the performance he gives with the rest of his body wasn’t impressive enough), but… who knows.

The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925)

It may not be readily apparent based on my writings thus far on this weblog, but over the past few years I’ve developed an inexplicable fondness for what I suppose you might call ‘lost world / explorer type adventure movies’. An overly specific designation perhaps, but necessarily so. I mean, if I just said “jungle movies” or something, chances are that would immediately conjure images of Tarzan, and fur-bikinied jungle girls, and strange exploitation quickies about women being menaced by guys in gorilla suits, and those sleazy, cut price cannibal / amazon movies that Eurocine and Jess Franco were churning out in the ‘80s… all of which are fine ways to pass an evening, I’m sure, but they’re not quite what I’m getting at. Plus, the intrepid explorers in the stories I'm talking about here are not always confined to the jungle - deserts, inaccessible mountain ranges and the bottom of the ocean all provide equally rousing backgrounds to their adventures.

But if I just said “adventure movies”, well, that would open up the field to swashbuckling films, pirate films and light-hearted historical capers of all descriptions. So no, what I mean is that particular tradition of lost world / lost continent / lost something or other tales, in which great white heroes of safari-suited colonial oppression travel to uncharted realms, treading upon ground untouched by man for millions of years (the natives just can’t be bothered, y’see) and encountering, well… dinosaurs, usually. I mean that’s what we paid our money for right?

What really gets me about these movies though (and likewise the books and serials that inspired them) isn’t just the opportunity to witness an endless parade of stop motion beasties, random wild life stock footage and square-jawed character actors smoking pipes and looking stern. Rather it’s the palpable feeling of wistfulness and nostalgia generated by a form of fantastic story-telling that has been rendered entirely obsolete by the social, scientific and technological advancements of the past hundred years.

For me at least, this nostalgia relates not so much to the abhorrent notions of Western imperialism and Caucasian manifest destiny that underpin these tales (in fact these regrettable ideologies are often addressed in these stories in such a quaint and off-hand manner they almost become perversely charming), but to the almost total disappearance of the glimmer of speculative plausibility that used to fire the imagination of their original audiences.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote ‘The Lost World’ in 1912, ok, it perhaps wasn’t likely that there was an untouched plateau sitting in the depths of the Amazon basin inhabited by giant prehistoric creatures… but it certainly wasn’t impossible. The book was inspired by a 1911 lecture presented to the Royal Geographic Society by renowned explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, during which he reported seeing “monstrous tracks of unknown origin” whilst undertaking a survey of the Huanchaca Plateau in Bolivia. And who else, back in 1911, was really in a position to cast doubt on his assertions? Have YOU surveyed the entire region by aeroplane, he, like Conan Doyle’s aptly-named protagonist Professor Challenger, may well have asked his audience. Have the Royal Geographic Survey succeeded in compiling a detailed map? Have any groundsmen staked out the terrain beneath those untold hundreds of miles of forest canopy?

Well, no, but I’d damn well like to give it a try, the eager young reader would be primed to respond, and a million dreams of adventures into The Unknown were born; dreams that have gradually faded ever since, as the world has become smaller, more heavily populated and more freely accessible, and that are now snuffed out entirely, rendered dead on arrival in the era of GPS, Google Earth and gap year geography students goofing around on Skype from the depths of the rainforest.

Could there still be an untouched plateau, deep in the heart of – well no, there couldn’t, we’d have found it already - end of story. We can relocate our mysteries and monsters to outer space or other dimensions or, at a push, to the bottom of the ocean or the wilds of Antarctica - but it’s no substitute really. On dry land at least, The Unknown is no more, and that spine-shivering sense of adventure that began when mediaeval cartographers first scrawled ‘here be dragons’ across their charts has finally been extinguished, leaving only these foggy tales of rampant brontosaurs and unconvincing ape-men as a final memorial.

As befits the somewhat wistful feeling evoked by these stories, I guess it follows that I often tend to enjoy cranky, flawed and ill-conceived entries in the canon to the big successes, and as such, what better place to begin such an examination than with First National Pictures’ 1925 adaptation of ‘The Lost World’ - a grand commercial failure in its day, now primarily viewed merely as a curio - a rather cranky warm-up for the formula that stop motion maestro Willis O’Brien would perfect a few years later on ‘King Kong’.

‘Kong’, it must be admitted, is a vastly more accomplished entertainment in every way, but somehow, in my usual bloody-minded, underdog-supporting fashion, I actually find ‘The Lost World’ more enjoyable. Great though ‘Kong’ is, these days it just seems so… over-familiar, with such a flat, brash, under-developed kind of narrative, exhibiting none of the rambling, discursive strangeness of its predecessor.

And it’s worth noting at this point that when I describe ‘The Lost World’ as "rambling" and "discursive", that’s based on the experience of only watching about one half of the material that comprised the original theatrical cut. Actually, there have been so many alternate presentations of this film over the years, so many rumours of lost reels, destroyed negatives and unconfirmed running times, that just trying to piece together what the hell is going on with the versions available to us today is a bit of a challenge. But most likely, the story goes something like this:

Originally running around two hours, ‘The Lost World’ was brutally chopped up by its distributors after it initially flopped, doing the rounds in subsequent years as a 30-something minute short (presumably consisting entirely of dinosaur action), before eventually being restored to a shaky 64 minute feature that turned up on a slew of public domain releases in the ‘90s. (1) A slightly more complete restoration emerged later, bulking things up to around 90 minutes, but it was the 64 minute cut that I ended up watching prior to this review, and… well, I was quite happy with it, to be honest.
 
Normally of course, I’d be appalled at such wholesale butchery of a motion picture, but in this case, I found that the one hour hack job hit the spot quite nicely. I’m assuming all the dinosaur footage and action/running around stuff stayed in (for indeed, there is enough of it to satisfy even the most rabid monster fan), but so seemingly did all of the necessary plot info, and the introductions, motivations and developments of the central characters, the threads of the various sub-plots and diversions etc. – are all also present and correct, making me wonder just what the hell the missing extra hour might have consisted of. Having sat through a number of arse-aching Silent Era ‘epics’ over the years – all seemingly falling victim to the fallacy that greater length equalled greater prestige – I fear the answer might simply be: an awful lot of faffing around.

As you might imagine, relatively little faffing remians in the 64 minute cut, and if the opening scenes that bring us to Professor Challenger’s pivotal lecture at the Royal Society seem a little choppy and meandering, all doubts are put to rest as soon as we get a look at the Professor himself and realise that THIS GUY is about to launch a daring expedition into the prehistoric unknown:

The guy in question is of course veteran Hollywood hellraiser Wallace Beery, and his singularly rousing performance is only one of the things that help make the scene depicting Challenger’s lecture so much fun.

“Bring on your mastodons! Bring on your mammoths!” demand the crowd of jeering, football rattle waving Edwardian students, before the Professor takes the stage to lay out his evidence for the existence of a lost Amazonian plateau rich in prehistoric flora & fuana, and of his plan to lead a rescue party in search of his unfortunate colleague Professor White, who has disappeared shortly after posting home the tantalising reports of his discoveries. It’s a shame that the 64 minute ‘Lost World’ doesn’t allow us to actually see these reports, instead cutting straight to the ‘WHO’S WITH ME?’ part of the presentation, as Challenger – having presumably reduced his critics to a state of cowed submission - canvasses for volunteers to join him on his perilous mission.



Happily, those who step up to the plate are exactly the crew the conventions of a lost world explorer type movie demands. Reporter and anxious ninny Lloyd Hughes takes on the juvenile lead / audience surrogate role, his character’s fiancée having apparently demanded that he must prove his manhood by facing some exotic dangers prior to their marriage; an unusual request perhaps, but observing Hughes’ chinless mugging here, I think I kinda get where she’s coming from. Lewis Stone meanwhile essays the obligatory safari-suited great white hunter Sir John Roxton, and does a very fine and dignified job of it too, whilst some other guy is an absent-minded, elderly scientist type (he’s probably a geologist or something, I forget, and presumably included to provide a contrast to Beery’s brow-furrowing human wrecking ball), and most importantly, Miss Bessie Love is on hand to add some glamour to proceedings, as the daughter of the missing Professor White, braving the travails of the tropics in search of her father. (2)


As an interesting aside, Love’s character, and the notion that Challenger’s expedition was launched with the intention of tracking down her father, is an addition to Conan Doyle’s source text, and a slightly unnecessary one you might think – perhaps merely a convoluted justification for including a new heroine and giving her a reason to accompany the chaps into the jungle. Actually though, a spot of Wikipedia-based “research” reveals that this alteration to the story in fact served to give the film a bit of a contemporary twist.

You see, Percy Harrison Fawcett, the man whose lectures inspired the original novel, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1925, whilst leading an expedition in search of an ancient lost city, provisional named “Z”, that he fervently believed to be located in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. The subject of much publicity and speculation at the time, Fawcett’s disappearance prompted numerous ill-fated ‘rescue missions’ in the years that followed, and it initially struck me as likely that the alteration to ‘The Lost World’s storyline must have been undertaken as a timely, if perhaps slightly distasteful, reference to these events. However, IMDB states that the film premiered in February 1925 – several months prior Fawcett’s final communications - so, assuming these dates are accurate, I suppose we should probably view the film’s script more as an eerie premonition of the explorer’s fate than as an exploitative cash-in. (3)

Anyway, getting back to the movie, we all know what’s coming next, so why waste time in getting there, eh? Before we know it, our intrepid band is kayaking down the Amazon with the help of their obligatory retinue of comic relief servants (a cockney, a bloke in black-face and a pet monkey are all on hand). Plentiful insert shots of mangy tigers, sloths, apes and so forth abound, providing the ‘wildlife footage’ angle that inevitably accompanied jungle tales prior to the era of TV wildlife documentaries, with some beasties (a big snake, primarily) even sharing shots with the actors amid the back-lot greenery and dry ice swamp smoke.

Soon the infamous plateau is in sight, and the proto-monster kids in the audience can rejoice, as they finally start to get what they paid for. Our initial monster sighting – a pterodactyl - has a bit of an Oliver Postgate look to it – shoddy and clumsily animated with a sort of jerky, one-frame-in-three style of motion, but pretty charming at the same time. Disappointingly for those who demand accuracy in their monsters, the rest of the creatures we’ll soon we introduced to largely follow suit, and actually, the dodginess of the monster effects is probably one of ‘The Lost World’s biggest pitfalls as regards its failure to really enter the canon as a pioneering monster movie.

I suppose on the one hand, we’ve got to remember this WAS 1925, and that this WAS the first time anyone had ever attempted to create ‘realistic’ moving creatures for a film on anything like this scale. But at the same time, given that the technical triumphs of ‘King Kong’ were only eight years away, the limitations of ‘Lost World’s wobbly, plasticine beasties speaks volumes about the astonishing progress O’Brien made with his work in the intervening years.

But thankfully, the questionable quality of 90 year old animated dinosaurs isn’t really a dealbreaker for me, and watching a lovingly rendered Allosaurus (“the most vicious pest of the ancient world”, according to Professor Challenger) going toe to toe with an alpha male Triceratops is a rousing sight irrespective of the level of formal sophistication used to achieve it. In fact, personally find that these scenes are actually enhanced by the jerky movements and rather malleable shapes of the combatants, and, from my own cranky, retrogressive viewpoint at least, they’re far more characterful and fun than the swish beasts of yr latter-day Jurassic Park sequels, just as the scientifically inaccurate stone dinos in Crystal Palace Park remain a lot more personable than their more solemn cousins in the Natural History Museum.

For modern viewers, the momentum of these dinosaur scenes is liable to be hampered not so much by the effects themselves but by the production’s rigorous insistence on fixed camera angles, which sees most of the prehistoric battles take place in static long shots, broken up only by occasional cutaways to leering close-ups dino faces (which are admittedly pretty great), and disconnected shots of our human characters cowering in fear, giving us their best ‘awe’ from amid patches of studio undergrowth. Presumably these drawbacks were imposed by the limitations of O’Brien’s stop motion technique – problems which an additional input of time and imagination would no doubt have solved, as was the case by the time ‘King Kong’ rolled around.

Shots in which monsters and people interact were also clearly a tricky business at this point in time, but although ‘The Lost World’ suffers from a modern POV for including very few of them, the ones that are here are generally very nicely done, particularly during by far my favourite part of the film: the exciting, city-wrecking conclusion!

For yes, after the chaos of the volcanic eruption that precipitates our heroes’ escape from the plateau, they find themselves in the enviable position of being able to trap a dazed and confused brontosaurus, prompting Challenger to decide he’s going to ship it straight back to London in time to hit the chattering classes with the ultimate “I told you so”. As you might expect, things do not go entirely to plan…

If this direct warm up for ‘..Kong’s dramatic conclusion fails to feature buzzing airplanes, tall buildings, imperilled heroines or tenderly and sympathetically portrayed monsters, what is DOES have is the sight of a crudely animated brontosaurus rampaging through the streets of a painstakingly detailed recreation of Edwardian London. And I don’t know about you, but there are few things I can imagine seeing in a motion picture that would please me more than that.

Although the whole London segment adds up to little more than five minutes of screen time (in the 64 minute cut), it’s a gloriously action-packed blue-print for all that would subsequently become required of such sequences. Smash, bash, crash goes the frightened and enraged leviathan, selectively laying waste to the area around Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, as top-hatted crowds flee in blithering terror! (Look out in particular for the shot in which a life-size dinosaur tail swishes by to knock a crowd of gawpers off their feet – I thought it was great).

Wasting no time, the beast moves on to menace and demolish a public house – ‘The Blue Posts’ – which seems to have attracted its particular displeasure. One brief sequence shows a cloth-capped pub patron (presumably an underworld ruffian of some kind) firing a pistol at the monster’s looming feet as he attempts to save a stricken lady from a stomping – stirring stuff indeed, and a welcome contrast to the rather sedate dino action that transpired back on the plateau.(4)

Rather brilliantly I think, the brontosaur’s haphazard reign of terror reaches its conclusion when it crashes through the surface of Tower Bridge mid-crossing and determinedly swims off down-river towards the coast. At this point, the people of London choose to call it a day and celebrate their victory over the dinosaur, irrespective of the fact that an unhappy prehistoric behemoth will presumably be wrecking havoc in Chatham or Gravesend before the night is through. Because hey, London is safe for now, so let’s all put our feet up and raise a glass to the inadequate weight-bearing capacity of our bridges, for truly, the sloppy standards of British municipal engineering have saved the day once more.

Watching these dazed Londoners celebrate the conclusion of the first of the innumerable urban monster rampages that would follow in the subsequent years feels strange indeed; a mirror perhaps of a few handfuls of perplexed yet overjoyed young silent-era cinema-goers, cheering the awkward birth of a modernist pulp aesthetic of cinematic destruction that would help define the next century of popular culture, just as surely as the fusty, safari-suited adventure tropes that opened the film had defined the previous century’s daydream excursions into the great unknown.



(1) Another version of events claims that the movie was actually a colossal success, and that all the original theatrical prints were destroyed for legal reasons pending completion of a never-to-be-completed sound version, or something like that. But again – who knows.

(2) Appearing here towards the start of a long and varied screen career, Love went on to feature in more interesting flicks than you can shake a stick at, even clocking up ‘old lady’ cameos in the likes of Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’ and Tony Scott’s ‘The Hunger’ in her declining years, not to mention an walk-on appearance in Jose Larraz’ ‘Vampyres’, of all things.

(3) Apparently described as a “Neitzschean explorer spouting eugenic gibberish” by the Canadian explorer and historian Dr John Hemming, you’ll be pleased to learn that a 1911 portrait of Percy Harrison Fawcett shows him sporting a mighty handle-bar moustache, a pipe, deerstalker hat and a singularly piercing gaze. Lack of dinosaurs notwithstanding, his Wikipedia entry suggests a life more eventful than anything that transpires in ‘The Lost World’.

(4) Central London currently boasts no less than six pubs named ‘The Blue Posts’ – a brief discussion of the theories behind the proliferation of the name plus further details can be found here. I won’t hazard a guess as to which of these establishments the brontosaurus was bothering (assuming it was based on a real location at all), but if any more daring (and bored) Londoners want to examine the screen shots and give it some thought, be my guest.

Youtube Film Club:Louis Feuillade, Fantomas and Les Vampires

I’ve recently been watching a number of films by the great Georges Franju (best known for 1960s ‘Yeux Sans Visage’ / ‘Eyes Without a Face’). Reviews coming soon, hopefully.

On several occasions in his career, Franju teamed up with the writer Jacques Champroux, grandson of famed silent era director Louis Feuillade, to make films loosely inspired by the spirit of Fantomas, the diabolical criminal mastermind who hopefully needs no introduction as one of the most popular and influential characters in French popular culture.

Although Fantomas was the creation of writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Louis Feuillade can arguably take just as much credit for cementing him in the popular imagination via his series of silent adventure serials, produced during 1913-14, at the same time as Allain & Souvestre were publishing their stories.

So, as useful background to Franju’s films, just out of general interest, and also as a primer to the as-yet-unread volume of Fantomas stories on my bookshelf, I thought I’d check some of Feuillade’s films out.

Sadly, very little footage from the Fantomas serials is available on Youtube (perhaps as a result of the same copyright issues that prevented Franju & Champroux from using the character directly in their films), but this brief clip can at least serve to reassure us that they were pretty bad-ass:



An unexpected delight that my Youtube searches did show up though is some significant chunks of Feuillide’s subsequent serial, Les Vampires (1915-16). Need I say more?



Actually, I probably had best say more. From what I can gather, Les Vampires does not actually feature any vampires, but, confusingly, it does prominently feature the eerie, expressionistic beauty of its heroine Irma Vep (portrayed by one Musidora, who sounds like a pretty fascinating woman in her own right), who plays a vampire at the theatre, and who becomes the main antagonist of a gang of Fantomas-like masked criminals called ‘Les Vampires’.

Filmed in the overly theatrical manner common to their period, with a stationary camera and few close-ups, Fuillade’s serials are clearly not in the same order of formal innovation as other early vampiric classics such as Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ or Carl Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’, but nonentheless, they are hugely enjoyable, relatively fast-paced little capers for their era, and their exquisite production design and solemn, gothic beauty is remarkable.

Whilst these films might not have had quite the same impact on the world as Fantomas, it seems inconceivable that many subsequent champions of the fantastique in France, my man Jean Rollin foremost amongst them, didn’t take at least SOME inspiration from ‘Les Vampires’.

Episode 2: “The Ring That Kills”:




According to Wikipedia, the publicity campaign for ‘Les Vampires’ saw this mysterious poster pasted around Paris…



…whilst the next day’s newspapers carried the following verse:

Of the moonless nights they are kings,

darkness is their kingdom.

Carrying death and sowing terror

the dark Vampires fly,

with great suede wings,

ready not only to do evil... but to do even worse


I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: God bless the French.



The entirety of “Les Vampires” first episode (entitled “The Severed Head”) can be seen split across four youtube videos, beginning here. Sadly, sound & picture quality is pretty low: