The 1970s Project

»  HOME  »  Events  »  Seminar Series:  Prof James Chapman 

• Conference 2008
• Registration
• Seminar Series
  • Malcolm Le Grice
  • Dr Andrew Spicer
  • Prof James Chapman
  • Dr Dominic Symonds
  • BBFC
  • David Curtis
• Call for Papers
• Reports

James Chapman is Professor of Film at the University of Leicester.

He has wide-ranging research interests in the history of British cinema and television and his recent publications include Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (2002), Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (2005) and Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of 'Doctor Who' ' A Cultural History (2006).

A second edition of Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films will be published in autumn 2007. He is a Council member of IAMHIST and is book reviews editor for the Journal of British Cinema and Television.

This paper will explore the cycle of four 'lost world' adventures produced in the 1970s by John Dark and directed by Kevin Connor: The Land That Time Forgot (1975), At the Earth's Core (1976), The People That Time Forgot (1977) and Warlords of Atlantis (1978).

The first three films were produced by Amicus, the fourth for EMI. I will argue that these films, marginalised or ignored in accounts of British cinema and popular histories of British science fiction and fantasy, are interesting for what they reveal about the industrial and cultural practices of 1970s cinema. They are significant for two reasons. Firstly, they represent perhaps the last example of an indigenous matin'e cinema: the release strategies of the films were targeted on school holiday periods and box-office records reveal that over 60 per cent of the admissions were for children. The evidence would suggest that the first three films, especially, were commercially successful, though the more expensive Warlords of Atlantis (released after Star Wars) was less so. And secondly, they exemplify the persistence of the genre of 'scientific romance' associated with nineteenth-century authors such as Jules Verne and Rider Haggard.

The first three films were adapted from novels by American author Edgar Rice Burroughs, though the social and gender politics of the originals are significantly revised in the transition to the screen. Warlords of Atlantis was an original screenplay by Brian Hayles, a regular contributor to the television SF series Doctor Who, and demonstrates an intelligent and potentially even radical 'counter history' of human development. The cultural and ideological themes explored in these films, in short, suggest that they deserve attention despite their occasionally risible dialogue and bargain-basement special effects.