FANTASIA OBSCURA: Revisiting ‘The Land That Time Forgot’
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, the phrase, “We’re all in the same boat” is never more appropriate.
The Land That Time Forgot (1974)
(Dist.: American International; Dir.: Kevin Connor)
Some things seem to go together no matter what, for good or ill. There’s almost always a pairing of cabernet sauvignon with filet mignon to the applause of most. There’s nitro and glycerin coming together, which usually means something’s gone horribly wrong.
And then, there’s Doug McClure and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Burroughs is one of the more popular genre writers from the 20th Century and someone whose works Hollywood turned to quite often.
By one count, there have been 56 films centered on Tarzan, perhaps Burroughs’ most enduring character, with releases that span from 1932 to 2016. After many decades, Burroughs’ Barsoom tales finally got to the screen, although John Carter didn’t get the attention from filmgoers the devoted fans of the books expected.
One work by Burroughs that had a relation with cinema between these two was his Caspak series. Serialized in Blue Book magazine in three parts from September to November 1918, the collected pieces were published by A. C. McClurg in 1924 under the name of the first segment (which was applied in this edition to the entire story), although in later years the three parts were published separately.
In the first of the three works, written in the form of a first-person memoir recovered from a salvaged thermos that carried it to shore, we get the account of Bowen Tyler, an American who survives the sinking of a merchant vessel during World War I by a German U-boat.
He and other survivors of the attacker, the U-33, luckily find themselves near the vessel when it surfaces to recharge its batteries. They seize the submarine, but control goes back and forth between the Germans and the survivors, during which time the U-33 drifts south into the Antarctic, where it discovers the lost land of Caprona.
Desperate to survive as well as driven by curiosity, the combined put aside their differences and explore a land of dinosaurs and cavemen, hoping to find a way back to civilization should they survive the experience.
And for the most part, the film is quite faithful to the novel, thanks to the respect of the source material shown by prominent fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock, who worked on the screenplay.
Unlike a lot of genre films where characters are composed in broad strokes with single-sentence mission statements to drive them, everyone on screen, whether American, English, German, or Neanderthal, is given enough depth and definition to be more than stock players to put in a scene in between the shots of dinosaurs.
Among the strong characters, Tyler is played by McClure (whose career by the time he did this film made him the basis for a character-cum-running gag on The Simpsons).
He does a decent job as the lead and anchor for a story that requires the audience accepting that you’re reacting to a lost continent filled with prehistoric creatures in a believable manner; without his approachability, the story would likely have fallen apart quickly.
Among those ably aiding McClure in solidly approaching Moorcock’s writing are Susan Penhaligon as Lisa Clayton, both the love interest and a respected biologist in her own right; John McEnery as Captain Von Schoenvorts, commander of the U-33 and as an amateur scientist able to strike up a good working relationship with Clayton; and Anthony Ainley as Dietz, an officer but reluctant gentleman who tries to serve his Kaiser the best way he can.
Overall, the whole cast does a great job of keeping the film going at a sustainable pace, making for one of the warmest and most human of any “lost world” films ever mounted.
Sadly, having dedicated actors working with a script from the author who gave the world the Eternal Champion series was not enough for this film to overcome some of its deficiencies.
For the sake of the budget, all non-human primitive fauna was depicted with puppets, which, no matter how good the actors, was hard enough to sit through for an audience raised on Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion works, let alone the modern expectations fed by CGI.
And the finale of the film feels rushed, going for a cinematic volcanic explosion to move the plot to its end at what seems a moment too soon.
As the film follows Burroughs’ book, we get reminders throughout that the story is based off an account made by someone who wrote it down before stuffing it in a water-tight container and throwing it into the ocean.
We can accept on some level that we, the viewer, managed to find the manuscript and read it, but the question creeps into the back of our minds: did anyone else ever get Tyler’s memoirs of survival in a prehistoric domain?
Well-l-l-l-l-l, actually-y-y-y…
NEXT TIME: When I go back, I think I’m going to fly instead…
