THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair* 
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*


Over three subsequent summers, producer John Dark and director Kevin Connor produced what a few references call the "Edgar Rice Burroughs" trilogy.  However, aside from the stories' authorial source, the only common element of the three films is that the heroes venture to primitive worlds full of prehistoric inhabitants. One is an adaptation of Burroughs' novel AT THE EARTH'S CORE, a series about a prehistoric world inside the Earth.  The other two draw in varying degrees from Burroughs' "Caprona trilogy," each of which focuses on a different hero in the prehistoric world of Caprona, hidden with a volcanic crater in a remote corner of the globe.

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT follows many key elements of the Burroughs book of that title.  Hero Bowen Tyler is one of a group that survives the torpedo-ing of their ship by a German U-boat during the hostitlities of WWI.  Tyler, accompanied by some English sailors and a gutsy young girl, boards the U-boat and takes control of it.  Unfortunately, when Tyler and his crew attempt to return to the world of their allies, they are fired upon. Their search for a safe haven lands them in the unknown land of Caprona, a land where evolution has gone berserk.

In the book Caprona's wealth of prehistoric life is explained by a mystical-sounding "pool of life" into which all Capronan species lay their "eggs." The 'eggs"-- which act more like "sperm"-- then progress along a "great chain of being" so as to become dinosaurs, cavepeople, or even a weird species of winged humanoid called the "Weiroo."  Connor's LAND does to its credit keep this wild explanation for Caprona's evolution-flux, including Burroughs' core idea about the different species of cavepeople.  In Burroughs' scheme, the cavepeople undergo evolution within their own lifetimes, progressing from "ape-men" to men able to use clubs, to men who can use axes, and so on.  The idea naturally doesn't come off as clearly in the cinematic medium as in prose, but the LAND script makes a game effort to adapt Burroughs, though it drops the idea of the animal-human hybrids.

The film also keeps the book's other most appealing aspect, showing how all of the humans-- English, German, and American-- are forced to work together to survive in this grim milieu.  The biggest change is the one wrought upon the German U-boat captain, who is a stereotypical evil Prussian type in the book, guilty of firing upon an innocent civilian ship.  In the film he's a generally sympathetic figure who justifies having blasted Tyler's ship because it carried hidden arms for his country's enemies.  In the book the German officer attempts to abandon Tyler and his friends to Caprona by making off with the submarine, and the villain only gets his just desserts in the third part of the trilogy.  In the film, the officer tries to save Tyler when another German abandons the heroes, but he and all of his officers ironically die in a volcanic explosion while Tyler's group lives through the chaos.

Further, Connor's film eschews the novel's strong focus on the romance between Tyler, the plucky girl and the German officer, to whom the girl was engaged by family arrangement.  Here the officer has no designs on the heroine, and there's barely any romance between Tyler and the woman with whom he ends up sharing Caprona.  Connor's direction is fluid and keeps the melodrama lively even without the romance.  And though the film makes considerable use of models and puppets, location shots taken in the Canary Islands gives the film an expansive feel characteristic of the best adventure-films.