This 1973 movie, currently being re-released by Disney, is a curious production in many ways. For one thing it doesn’t feel like an early 1970s movie, instead it seems to belong to the cycle of "Lost World" films that ran from the late 1950s to the middle of the 1960s. True, Milton Subotsky and John Dark relaunched the genre in 1975 with The Land That Time Forgot but their movies had a much more contemporary feel to them than this one.
Based on a 1961 novel called "The Lost Ones" by British writer Ian Cameron (real name Donald Gordon Payne) it's very much
in the tradition of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1907 a rich Englishman, Sir Anthony Ross (played completely over-the-top by Donald Sinden who had the audience I saw it with falling about with laughter at lines that weren't supposed to be funny) pressgangs an American archaeologist (David Hartman) to accompany him on an expedition to search for his missing son at the North Pole. They travel to the Arctic Circle in an airship commanded by its unwilling designer Captain Brieux (Jacques Marin doing a "comic Frenchman" routine that also seems to belong to a different cinema era).
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