Claude-Rains Movie Reviews

You can watch "The Lost World" one of two ways.

1) A maddeningly poor version of the great Arthur Conan Doyle novel, turning memorable characters into crude stereotypes, and adding a half-dozen others so you won't notice there's only one brief sequence featuring "dinosaurs" (magnified lizards with rubber collars, tortured into listlessly attacking each other).

2) As an early '60s camp fest, what with the babealicious cave girl, Fernando "you look mahvelous" Lamas as a vengeful native, and Claude Rains as a peppery pipsqueak Professor Challenger -- not to mention Irwin Allen's trademark colored-lights-on-styrofoam special effects. Best of all, Jill St. John (an Annette Bening without irony) in her pink boots, who announces "I can ride, fly, and shoot better than any man I know" and then spends the balance of the movie shrieking and running for the strong arms of David "Al" Hedison. Or is it Al "David" Hedison?

Anyway, stick with the sweet, rather innocent 1925 silent version... Conan Doyle loved it and it's still miles ahead of every subsequent "Lost World" movie -- including the recent Bob Hoskins "ecologically correct" CGI fiasco.

Irwin Allen's 1960 version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic dinosaur adventure, and the Willis O'Brien 1925 classic of the silent era. A band of explorers travel to an ancient plateu in South America, and encounter gigantic prehistoric beasts. The actors are great (to to Allen form, he made up for the poor special effects with big time actors) including Michael Rennie (THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL), Claude Rains (THE WOLF MAN) Jill St. John (DIOMANDS ARE FOREVER) Fernando Lamas, and many more! Sadly, only lizards with phony make-up aplinces are blown up on film to tremendous size. But using real lizards does have a cetain charm, and the motion is realistic because it is real! So all in all, good production values, good acting, exeptable special effects, a 4 star movie.

I remember seeing this movie as an early teenager and found it to be excellent for the time. Compared to movies today it seems very poor but it was a classic "B" movie for the times. I recommend it for anyone's video library

This Rank/Cineguild production directed by David Lean is based on a novel by H G Wells, here adapted by Lean and Stanley Haynes, though with a screenplay credited to Eric Ambler. Although the plot is about a triangle, Lean's focus is on Ann Todd as the woman between two men, her husband and the man who was her first love but whom she refused to marry. Her situation is presented in an exchange between the man, Trevor Howard and Todd - "If two people really love each other they want to be together. They want to belong to each other", Todd - "I want to belong to myself", "Then your life will be a failure". However in the tradition of upper class Brits, Todd's life of failure means a marriage to a successful banker, Claude Rains.
The narrative has an unusual triple flashback structure, which is perhaps why it needed three writers, with the present being narrated by Todd with the prospect of a divorce, and flashbacks to the vacation in Switzerland where the instigating incident occurs, Todd's memory/flashback of 9 years earlier re-meeting Howard, and small memories of their first romance. The initial meeting is tainted by lines like Todd's "Why can't we be in love without the clutching and gripping", though later Todd admits to "not being a very good person". Howard's character has his ambiguities too, being a university biology lecturer who knowingly has an affair with a married woman. The infidelity gets a funny spin by Rains' business with Germany and Italy pre-WW2, and Rains saying he has "a taste for intrigue", though the film being made post-WW2 allows him to speak of the "Teutonic hysteria" of the Germans.
In spite of some of Lean's technical touches, the thing that de-passionates the situation is Todd, in her first film for her then husband. Whilst at times she resembles Garbo, the rather butch Todd lacks the divine one's expressiveness, with Lean reduced to filming her running from Howard in slow motion to give her some lyricism. All three of the leads are oddly lit indelicately, perhaps to suggest that all this passage of time has aged them, but this with Todd, adds to the destruction of romantic intent. Lean provides a vocal montage of telephone conversations, cuts from a kiss to a bunch of flowers, doors slamming to a typewriter slide of the divorce document, gives Rains a cuckold paranoid montage, and has a "Keep Smiling" poster featured in the background of the climactic scene in the train underground, though the idea of Todd not buying a ticket before she enters rather pre-empts things.
Rains has the audience empathy, even if the odd way he stand in a ¾ pose when he confronts someone seems silly. He is the more emotional of the three, but because of the British standards of polite behaviour, his yells are either heard off-camera or with his back to us. The best scene reads as Hitchcock-influenced with Rains dictating to his secretary and Lean continually cutting to a pair of tickets to a play Todd and Howard go to see. The title First Love gets a comic payoff when we hear it is a musical with a fatuous title song.