The Valley of Gwangi **** (1969, James Franciscus, Gila Golan, Richard Carlson, Laurence Naismith) – Classic Movie Review 2434

Director James O’Connolly’s 1969 monster movie The Valley of Gwangi is a big treat for all fans of dinosaur movies. It features a huge T-Rex called Gwangi, so named from a Native American word meaning lizard. That would be a giant lizard!

The Valley of Gwangi is the last dinosaur-themed film to be animated by Ray Harryhausen, whose next film was The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). His convincing stop-action special effects animated creatures spearhead a late-Sixties near top-of-the-range cowboys battle dinosaurs movie with a screen story written by the 1933 King Kong’s special-effects pioneer Willis H O’Brien, originally as a project for himself. 

Conceiving it as a follow-up to King Kong (1933), O’Brien began pre-production in 1941 at the RKO-Pathé Studios on a story by Harold Lamb about a huge T-Rex called Gwangi, with John Speaks as producer. But the film was cancelled when studio management was changed and it was never made. However, an early black and white version of the cowboys in Africa footage was shot and eventually used in O’Brien’s Mighty Joe Young (1949).

O’Brien’s screen story first saw the light of day as The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956).

James Franciscus stars in The Valley of Gwangi as cowboy Tuck, who seeks his fame and fortune by capturing the ancient monster tyrannosaurus rex that lives in the lost world of Forbidden Valley in a secret zone in Mexico. 

Showmen put the Gwangi in their show in a Mexican circus, from where in true King Kong style he escapes, sharing Kong’s understandable natural aversion to being put on show to the gawking public. From this point on, tyrannosaurus Gwangi is kept very busy attacking everything in sight – dinosaurs, elephants and even a church. Excellent!

The monsters (styracosaurus and pterodactyl too) are definitely the stars of the movie with the humans understandably dull in comparison. The story is scripted by William E Bast, one-time biographer and room-mate of James Dean.

Gila Golan plays beautiful cowgirl T J Breckenridge in The Valley of Gwangi (1969).

Polish beauty Gila Golan is dubbed as beautiful cowgirl T J Breckenridge, Richard Carlson is Champ, and Laurence Naismith also stars as British palaeontologist Professor Horace Bromley, with Freda Jackson as the gypsy Tia Zorina, Gustavo Rojo as Carlos (dubbed by Robert Rietty), Curtis Arden as Mexican boy Lope and Dennis Kilbane as Rowdy.

The Valley of Gwangi was filmed in Almeria and Cuenca, Spain, with the bullring scenes shot in Almería’s plaza de toros and the finale at Cuenca’s cathedral. So it kind of counts as a spaghetti Western.

Alas in 1969 interest in monster movies was thought to be waning and the film was released with little publicity in a double bill with a biker movie, so it thus was not as successful as Harryhausen’s earlier work. However, in 1971, Warner Bros reissued the film in a double bill with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) so a lot of fans got to see it.

Gwangi’s vocals are a sound effect of a camel and a raspberry run backwards. The sequence of the roping of Gwangi was done by actors holding onto ropes tied to a monster stick that was in the back of a Jeep. The jeep and stick when filmed with Gwangi are on a back rear projection plate and hidden by his body and the portions of rope attached to his body are painted wires matched with the real ropes.

The BBFC wrongly gave the 1995 video release a 12 certificate because of a mishearing of the F-word. It was finally given a U certificate for the 2003 DVD.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2434

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