The Valley of Gwangi

Plot

In early 20th century Mexico, T.J. Breckenridge hosts a rodeo. Her former lover, Tuck Kirby, a former stuntman working for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, wants to buy her out. He is followed by Lope, a Mexican boy who intends to join the rodeo on a quest for fame and fortune. T.J. is not interested in Tuck, who is still attracted to her. T.J. accepts Tuck when he saves Lope from a bull.

T.J. has an advantage she hopes will boost attendance at her show – a horse called El Diablo. Tuck meets British paleontologist Horace Bromley, who is working in a nearby Mexican desert. Bromley shows Tuck fossilized horse tracks, and Tuck notes their similarity to El Diablo's feet. Tuck sneaks Bromley into the circus for a look at El Diablo, which Bromley declares to be an Eohippus.

The horse came from a place known as the Forbidden Valley. Romani Tia Zorina claims that the horse is cursed, and demands that it be returned. Later, she and the other Romani collaborate with Bromley to steal El Diablo and release it in the valley. Bromley hopes to follow the horse to its home in search of other prehistoric specimens. Carlos, a former member of the Romani tribe now working for T.J.'s circus, walks in on the theft and tries to stop it, but is knocked out.

Tuck arrives just as the Romani leave. Carlos sees him as he is regaining consciousness. Tuck notices that the horse is missing, and follows Bromley. T.J. and her crew discover Carlos, who claims that Tuck stole El Diablo for himself. Carlos, T.J., and the others decide to follow Tuck and Bromley into the valley.

In the Forbidden Valley, Tuck, T.J., and the rest of the group gather and discover why the valley is said to be cursed when a Pteranodon swoops down and snatches Lope. However, due to the extra weight, it falls back to the ground. After Carlos kills the Pteranodon, they spot an Ornithomimus, which they try to capture. It is eventually killed by Gwangi, an Allosaurus, which chases Bromley and the rest of the group. However, a Styracosaurus appears and drives Gwangi away, while Lope reveals Carlos's lie.

Gwangi pursues the group to their base camp. They try to rope him, but he breaks free when the Styracosaurus reappears. Gwangi kills the Styracosaurus and later kills Carlos, but is knocked out by a rockslide while trying to exit the valley in pursuit of the rest of the group.

Cast

James Franciscus as Tuck

Gila Golan as T.J.

Richard Carlson as Champ

Laurence Naismith as Professor Bromley

Freda Jackson as Tia Zorina

Gustavo Rojo as Carlos

Mario De Barros as Bean (as Mario de Barros)

Dennis Kilbane as Rowdy

Jose Burgos as the Dwarf

Curtis Arden as Lope

Production

Development

Ray Harryhausen presented Gwangi to film producer Charles H. Schneer in the mid-1960s, hoping to revive a project started by Harryhausen’s mentor Willis O'Brien from a screenplay originally called Valley of the Mists. O'Brien, responsible for the pioneering special effects in King Kong (1933), envisioned a film with a similar premise as Kong, following a tragic monster captured then released into civilization. It was a co-production with RKO Pictures and Colonial Pictures; President of RKO George J. Schaefer agreed to finance the film, providing O’Brien with a $552,000 budget. O’Brien anticipated his stop-motion effects would be complimented well by director Ernest B. Schoedsack’s live action. Marcel Delgado sculpted several prototypes of the film’s monster: an Allosaurus named “Gwangi”. Unfortunately for O’Brien, due to executive changes at RKO and wartime constraints, the project was scrapped in 1942, and no filming took place.

Despite the project’s demise, O’Brien reappropriated ideas from it for subsequent films. Mighty Joe Young (1949) and The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) both incorporated similar thematic elements; the latter film acknowledged O’Brien with a co-credit for the screenplay and utilized the armature from the original Gwangi puppet.

In the late 1960s, Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer decided to reunite after several years of making films apart. Harryhausen suggested reviving two old O'Brien projects, War Eagles, which had been developed for MGM, and Valley of the Mists. Schneer did not see how they could get a script out of War Eagles, but was enthusiastic about the Valley script and bought the rights from O'Brien's widow. Although O'Brien was the creator of the original story, an on-screen credit for him was not included in The Valley of Gwangi .

Schneer had the script rewritten by William Bast and offered the project to Columbia, who had made all Schneer's previous collaborations with Harryhausen. The studio turned it down but Warner Bros agreed to finance. James O'Connelly signed to direct.

Harryhausen said they decided to keep the story's early 20th Century time period to eliminate the "cliches about the army moving in with tanks and missiles."

Gwangi was described in O'Brien's original script as an Allosaurus, although O'Brien apparently did not draw much distinction between Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, as he also referred to the Tyrannosaurus in the original King Kong (modeled by Marcel Delgado) as an "Allosaurus". According to Ray Harryhausen, his own version of Gwangi (and O'Brien's Gwangi too, as well as Delgado's Tyrannosaurus) was based on a Charles R. Knight painting of a Tyrannosaurus – one of the two most famous paintings by Knight, and one that is instantly recognizable by the eye being placed too far forward on the skull (this was based on concurrently incomplete skeletal remains and the eye was mistakenly placed in one of the antorbital fenestrae), as well as ultimately and incorrectly portraying Tyrannosaurus with a three-fingered hand. This famous Tyrannosaurus image is also reflected in Harryhausen's "Rhedosaurus" in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. In an interview featured on the Valley of Gwangi DVD, Harryhausen said "We sometimes called it an Allosaurus... They're both meat eaters, they're both Tyrants... one was just a bit larger than the other." Gwangi was scaled to be 14 feet tall, within the size range of an average adult Tyrannosaurus (although not the largest), and at the upper limit of the largest Allosaurus specimens.

Special effects

The Valley of Gwangi was the last dinosaur-themed film that Harryhausen animated, and he made much use of his experience in depicting extinct animals from his earlier films. Close to a year was spent on the special effects (there were more than 300 'Dynamation' cuts in the film, a record number for Harryhausen), with the roping of Gwangi being the most labor-intensive animated sequence. It was achieved by having the actors hold on to 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 that are matched with the real ropes. The coordination of Gwangi's animation with live actors on horseback (and the horses appearing to react to Gwangi) was particularly difficult to film, and the source of an editorial lapse in a following scene. Gwangi bites through the ropes around his neck when first lassoed and later has his jaws roped together when unconscious. However, he is then shown being transported in a cart again held only by ropes around his neck but with jaws now un-bound.

The first animated sequence in the film is a diving act done by T.J. and her horse. Because it was decided that it was too risky to have a rider and horse jump off a 40-foot (12-meter) high platform into a tank of water, a model horse and rider were used. After tempting Gila Golan's horse to jump from a mock-up platform onto a trampoline, the film cut to an animated model suspended on wires (actually, it was just a tiny toy horse and rider bought in a toy store). The splash was real, triggered by an electric charge inside the tank.

After local Romani steal the Eohippus, it is released back into the Forbidden Valley. For all the scenes where the cowboys are chasing the creature, the animated model was used. However, in one long shot, a baby goat was used instead because the model would have been too small.

The pterosaurs were mistakenly given bat's wings (with elongate fingers supporting the membrane; pterosaurs had one finger forming the wing's leading edge but none on the membrane). The wings appear to mimic those of a pterosaur from an earlier Harryhausen film, One Million Years B.C. (1966). Close-up sequences of the pterosaurs in Gwangi were provided by life-size models. For the scene when Lope is snatched from his horse by the Pteranodon, the boy was raised by wires painted out in the studio and Harryhausen animated the eight-inch-(20-centimeter) high model pterosaur to correspond with his movements. However, once the creature gets up to a certain altitude the real boy was replaced with a model which was used until he crawls away from the creature which is being killed by Carlos on the ground. Bromley the paleontologist correctly identifies it as a pterodactyl (the classification of pterosaurs that Pteranodon is a part of) while he is inspecting it on the ground.

Casting

Actress Gila Golan was cast at the insistence of Warner Bros. Her Israeli accent was so strong that all of her lines were redubbed on the film by a voice actress.

Actor Laurence Naismith, who plays Professor Bromley, had earlier appeared in Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts as the shipbuilder Argos.

The film was filmed in Almería and Cuenca, Spain. The bullring scenes were shot in Almería's Plaza de Toros and the finale at Cuenca's cathedral. Some scenes with dinosaurs like the Pteranodon scene or the fight between the Allosaurus and Styracosaurus were filmed in Almería, in Tabernas Desert. The unusual rock formations of Ciudad Encantada near Cuenca were used for the forbidden valley.

Schneer says the director "lost interest in the middle of shooting. I don't think he enjoyed it. He just didn't have his heart in it, when he was halfway through."

According to Bast, "the director was monumentally stupid. Charlie opted for someone who matched his own insensitivity. O’Connolly started tampering with the script as they were leaving. I thought, 'This is going to be a mess'."

Reception

Box office

According to Harryhausen, "We got trapped in a change of management shuffle at Warner Bros. If only they had publicized it properly! They just dumped the picture on the market. A lot of people who would have loved it never got a chance to see it, never knew it was playing."

"The new administration didn't give it the kind of release I expected," said Schneer. "They didn't know how to market our type of picture as well as Columbia did. It was their money and their property, and they did what they wanted. I had no rapport with that new management. There was nothing I could do to change their minds."

Critical reception

Schneer later said he "wasn't very keen about" the film. "Because of the subject matter and the period in which it was set, it just didn't have the same appeal to me that our other pictures had. The central image of the cowboys roping the dinosaur was imaginative, but it didn't hold up for feature length."

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 73% of 11 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.6/10.

Comic book adaptation

Dell Movie Classic: The Valley of Gwangi (December 1969)

Legacy

By the time of the film's release, interest in monster movies of this type was waning. Management at Warner Bros. Pictures and Warner Bros.-Seven Arts also changed, and the film was released with little promotional effort on a double-bill with a biker film; it thus missed its target audience and was not as successful as earlier Harryhausen efforts. It has since become a cult classic.

Among the critics, The New York Times called it a "generally run-of-the-mill monster rally."

The scene where Gwangi suddenly appears from behind a hill and snatches the fleeing Ornithomimus in his jaws was later copied in Steven Spielberg’s big-budget dinosaur film, Jurassic Park.

During the 1980s hit TV series Scarecrow and Mrs. King, anytime a television was shown on in the series, The Valley of Gwangi was on the screen.

In episode 2–28 (2000) of the American version of the TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the scene of Tuck fighting the pterodactyl was used for the green screen video during the Newsflash segment.

Artist Mark Cline's 2005 attraction Dinosaur Kingdom was inspired by The Valley of Gwangi.

Justin Parpan's 2007 children's read-aloud book, Gwango's Lonesome Trail (Red Cygnet Press, Inc., ISBN 1-60108-004-2) features a prehistoric dinosaur named "Gwango" roaming the contemporary American Southwest.

In the episode "The One Where Joey Speaks French" (2004) of the sitcom Friends (1994), Ross Geller watches the film while in a hospital.

In the 2011 animated film, Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur, during a night time chase scene through the town a movie theatre can be seen in the background playing two dinosaur-themed monster movies, The Valley of Gwangi (1969) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) [another Ray Harryhausen film from Warner Bros].