Starring Wallace Beery, Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Hughes, Alma Bennett
Directed by Harry O. Hoyt
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
The irascible Professor Challenger leads an expedition to an African plateau hoping to prove his claim that living dinosaurs still exist there.
An early cinematic showcase for the stop-motion effects of Willis O'Brien, who would later supervise the effects for the classics King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, this film is a treasure as well, with O'Brien bringing an allosaurus, a triceratops, a pterodactyl, a brontosaurus, and more to vivid life in footage that had to have amazed audiences of the time. Most of the animation still holds up remarkably well, although the film is dated in other areas, especially in the inclusion of an actor in blackface speaking in fractured English. Otherwise, the cast is fairly entertaining, with Beery ideally cast as Challenger, Hughes very earnest as the young reporter Edward Malone, and Stone a welcome sight years before his memorable run at MGM. Also notable for being an adaptation of a work by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, better known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, it's not a close adaptation, but remains an important piece of cinema history.
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