The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

As I've mentioned many times before, I have a weakness for films featuring dinosaurs.  I have a particular weakness for those in which the dinosaurs are created with stop motion animation.  If they are featured living in some kind of 'lost world', even better.  The Valley of Gwangi (1969) ticks all of those boxes, plus, the dinosaurs are animated by Ray Harryhausen himself.  The film had its origins with an unrealised Willis O'Brien project, Valley of the Mists, which he had tried to get into production several times in the forties and fifties, with no success. The unique selling point of the project was that it combined cowboys with dinosaurs, something that The Valley of Gwangi delivers on, providing audiences with striking scenes of mounted cowboys lassoing dinosaurs.   Its tale of cowboys going south to an isolated 'forbidden valley' in Mexico where, it seems, various prehistoric animals have survived the extinction of their peers, with he aim of capturing one alive, for exhibition in the US, is generally well realised.  There are plenty of dinosaurs on display and lots of interaction between them and the actors in a series of decently staged action scenes.  It all builds up to a stirring climax in a border town, when the title dinosaur, 'Gwangi'(which appears to be a hybrid between a Tyrannosaur and an Allosaur), gets loose and goes on a rampage, winding up in a local cathedral.

While the film boasts both plenty of action and plenty of dinosaurs, which I recall enjoying a great deal when I first saw it as a kid in the seventies, a recent viewing of it left me feeling slightly disappointed.  The film's main problem is that it doesn't bring much that is new to the genre, its main contributions being the cowboys and the period setting.  No matter how well staged all of its set pieces are, they have an air of over familiarity about them.  Aside from the dinosaur roping, they all seem to be derived from sequences in earlier Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen movies. (Although, in truth, even the lassoing scene has a precedent in O'Brien's Mighty Joe Young (1949), where the title ape gets similar treatment). The whole 'forbidden valley' set up is straight from The Lost World (1925), the use of the title monster as a sideshow attraction is from King Kong (1933) - even Gwangi's unveiling is reminiscent of Kong's unveiling in New York, the pterodactyl carrying off a woman is from One Million Years BC (1966), while the dinosaur-elephant fight late on in the movie is essentially a rerun of the fight between the Ymir and an elephant in Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957).  

While derivative in content terms, The Valley of Gwangi is at least decently made, with some nicely shot Spanish locations standing in for Mexico, although, overall, it lacks the dynamism of earlier films featuring Harryhausen's work.  This might well be down to the choice of Jim O'Connolly as director, who was better known for working on the somewhat lower key 'Edgar Wallace' series of crime thrillers for Merton Park.  Perhaps the producers had been influenced by his more recent work on the more flamboyant Joan Crawford starring horror film Berserk! (1967), but he clearly had little affinity for the material in The Valley of Gwangi, with his direction sometimes feeling lacklustre and even disinterested.  A good cast, led by James Fransiscus and including genre veteran Richard Carlson, help carry the action along, with Laurence Naismith particularly memorable as the paleontologist dismayed by the crass commercial exploitation of the dinosaur.  As this is another of those films in which people discover a lost world and proceed to kill just about every prehistoric survival they encounter, the professor could at least rest assured that once Gwangi was killed, there weren't any more dinosaurs left to be exploited.  Released without much publicity, the film was something of a box office disappointment, but became a TV favourite in the seventies.

(As a side note, some of the dinosaur footage from the film turned up in an episode of Fantasy Island, when Mr Roarke was apparently able to create a whole lost world, including dinosaurs, in order to facilitate a couple of guests' fantasy).