The Lost World

Harry O. Hoyt, First National, 1925, from Conan Doyle. Wallace Beery is Professor Challenger, who leads an Amazon plateau expedition and brings a brontosaur back to London. Willis H. O’Brien’s stop-motion dinosaurs do the work the actors cannot: an allosaurus, a trampling in the city. Doyle himself appeared in a preface in some prints. The AFI treats it as the feature that proved animation could carry a night’s bill. Cooper and Schoedsack were watching; King Kong is the next sentence. Beery plays the beard as comedy. The beasts have weight.