Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may be best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he also invented another famous literary character: Prof. George Edward Challenger. Doyle fashioned five novels featuring the zoology professor -- his favorite creation -- starting with The Lost World (1912), which was adapted into a landmark 1925 silent film starring Wallace Beery. For the 1960 remake -- also entitled The Lost World -- Claude Rains stepped into the role. (The book spawned another movie version in 1992 with John Rhys-Davies as the professor, as well as a 1994 sequel, a 1998 version with Patrick Bergin, and numerous other television adaptations.)

The story has Prof. Challenger in London claiming to have discovered a prehistoric world of dinosaurs deep in the Amazon. To prove it, he organizes an expedition to return there, taking along another scientist, a reporter, a hunter and others. But as directed by Irwin Allen, years before his primary claim to fame as producer of bloated extravaganzas like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), the 1960 edition of The Lost World is probably best known for its amusing "dinosaurs."

Fox publicity director Harry Brand boasted in the film's publicity notes that "most of the beasts shown are actual living things, with a vitality which cannot be simulated by models," but what he failed to mention was that those living things amounted to little more than modern-day lizards with glued-on horns and fins, photographed in close-up and slow motion. On the other hand, many critics of the day sarcastically praised the monsters for giving better performances than the humans.

Originally, The Lost World was to have featured topnotch stop-motion sequences designed by special effects legend Willis O'Brien, who had worked on the 1925 film version of the story as well as on King Kong (1933). O'Brien had long desired to update Conan Doyle's story to the modern, widescreen, stereophonic movie world, but he wound up very distraught when Irwin Allen decided to use actual reptiles as dinosaurs rather than wait for the time-consuming stop-motion work to be achieved. According to author Dennis Fischer, O'Brien was ultimately "relegated to designing split-screen scenes for the film's widescreen format."

Allen imported six-foot-long monitor lizards from Singapore and paired them with alligators. In one famous sequence, one of the monitor lizards dukes it out with a Cayman alligator so potently that the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals lodged a formal complaint against the Fox studio. Production was also halted by an actors' strike, but the final result performed well at the box office and drew some positive reviews mixed with the negative ones.

The New York Times dismissed the film as "obvious, plodding and often heavy-handed," and called Claude Rains, with his red hairdo and beard, a "caricature," while trade paper Variety declared, "the picture's chief attraction is its production gusto... The dinosaurs are exceptionally lifelike."

Among the supporting cast is actor David Hedison, who had previously appeared in the films The Enemy Below (1957) and The Fly (1958). He had been attracted to The Lost World for the opportunity to work with Michael Rennie and Claude Rains, but his experience turned out to be an unhappy one. "Jill St. John in pink tights and her silly little dog," he later said. "There was no reality to any of it."

Irwin Allen next offered Hedison a role in the feature film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), but Hedison refused. When Allen then created a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea television series in 1964, he again approached Hedison, who again refused. Allen implored the actor to come aboard, and Hedison finally relented when Richard Basehart was cast as well. Hedison's character, Captain Crane, became perhaps his best-known role. Years later, Hedison said that he realized the reason Allen had been so insistent on casting him was probably because Allen had so much stock footage of Hedison from The Lost World, which the cost-cutting producer found ways of incorporating in the TV show.

Co-star Jill St. John was married during production to Lance Reventlow, the son of heiress Barbara Hutton. It was a pairing that drew much media attention and would last four years.

By Jeremy Arnold

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SOURCES: Dennis Fischer, Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895-1998 C.J. Henderson, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies Tom Weaver, Eye on Science Fiction