UNKNOWN ISLAND (1948), TWO LOST WORLDS (1951)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological*

On at least on occasion these two dino-films were paired on a double bill, even though they came from different independent studios. Though  I re-watched both on streaming months apart, I can attest that any viewer unlucky enough to have watched both together would truly have got "the worst of both worlds."

Having said that, neither UNKNOWN nor LOST is truly rock-bottom; they're just aggressively mediocre in comparison to even the simplistic 1960 adaptation of THE LOST WORLD. Like the explorers of Irwin Allen's movie, UNKNOWN's main characters consist of three males and a female. However, all three men are more concerned with contending over the woman than with exploring a contemporary domain where prehistoric creatures still roam. I remember seeing UNKNOWN on TV once some forty-fifty years ago, and it wasn't lost on me that the script-- crafted by two writers whose repertoires were confined to very obscure third-tier flicks-- had very little to say about the wonders of the prehistoric fauna. (Parenthetically, director Jack Bernhard also labored mostly on the third tier, though he recently got some serious film-critic attention thanks to a DVD release of his 1946 noir DECOY.)

The script for UNKNOWN makes no bones about its primary concern with the way in which rich beauty Carole (top billed Virginia Grey) instantly intrigues every man she encounters. She's first seen in the company of her fiancee Osborne (Phillip Read), whose project, to photograph the legendary monsters of the Unknown Island, she Carole is bankrolling. The two of them enter a Singapore tavern looking for the master of a charter vessel, Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane), and though he disparages their mission as foolishness, the crude, bully-boy skipper accepts their commission, while also intimating that he harbors lustful intentions toward Carole. But Tarnowski also manages to bring along his own nemesis. He invites on the voyage another sailor, Fairbanks (Richard Denning), because Fairbanks had briefly visited the Unknown Island and seen its horrific denizens, even though no one believed the sailor's stories and he subsequently turned to drink. Though Virginia Grey gets top billing, UNKNOWN is really the story of how Denning's character regains his manhood-- and, not coincidentally, how he wins the expedition's sole female away from her fiancee-- who, it is implied, may be less than a man for accepting her financial assistance.

So the short voyage to Unknown Island serves to set up Carole as the bone over which the three male canines will contend, with Fairbanks gradually recovering his courage as he falls in love with this technically engaged woman, and she begins to reciprocate. On the island proper, Osborne gets his chance to photograph some of the shabby-looking dinos (all men in suits), but Tarnowski has greater aspirations, for he thinks he's going to hit paydirt if he can take a prehistoric beast back to the civilized world. Thus he's partly like a purely mercenary version of Carl Denham, as well as being a beast far less noble than Denham's anthropoid quarry. At one point, Tarnowski considers using Osborne as bait for one of the dinos, but it's not spoiling much to say that the nasty captain is the one who ends up being monster-chow-- though only after he tries to rape Carole and gets beaten down by Fairbanks in all his resurgent manhood. I think Osborne survives to sail away from Unknown Island with the happy couple, though frankly the script loses interest in this third wheel early on. 

The badness of the dino costumes is placed on full display toward the end, when UNKNOWN tries to "ape" the classic KING KONG by having a T-Rex battle a moth-eaten "giant sloth." There's a slight sense that Carole, having "worn the pants" in her relationship with Osborne, is put in her rightful subordinate place after a "real man" defeats a "beast-man" for her hand-- though at film's end we don't really know that Fairbanks will prove any better than Osborne in being able to resist depending on a woman with a substantial bank account.

Whatever the failings of UNKNOWN ISLAND, though, at least it's firmly within the tradition of the "recrudescent prehistory" subgenre. TWO LOST WORLDS just barely squeaks into that genre-terrain toward the end of the movie, thanks to its interpolation of footage from ONE MILLION B.C.-- which footage, of course, was just rear-projected lizards and crocodiles made to look like dinosaurs. 

Some online reviews wondered if LOST was actually made up, not of two "worlds," but of two separate episodes of a projected teleseries, since it combines a story of a pirate raid with a separate tale about the main character and his allies ending up on a dino-island. However, this EOFFTV review does better than I can in establishing that LOST actually seems to be a patchwork of FOUR different projects. The revelation that the scenes of two contending sea-vessels comes from 1940's CAPTAIN CAUTION explains why those scenes, including a fire on one ship, look more expensive than anything one was likely to see in an early 1950s TV show. 

The script thus exists to cobble together disparate footage, and I can facetiously imagine Roger Corman seeing this turkey and being inspired to similar feats of footage-mashups. Given that the action is sporadic and the characterization almost non-existent, the movie has only two sources of appeal. One is that its main character, sailor Hamilton, is played by the redoubtable James Arness four years prior to his breakthrough role in TV's GUNSMOKE-- though Arness never has any scenes that take advantage of his rugged charisma. The film's other source of appeal is that though director Norman Dawn couldn't do much with this patchwork carpet, in the same year he turned out the infinitely more amusing WILD WOMEN, the writer-director's final opus and a significant entry in the domain of "femme formidable" cinema.