The Lost City (1935)

Harry Revier, William Boyd, Kane Richmond, Claudia Dell · 1935 · 232 min

A mad scientist in a jungle fortress is causing worldwide natural disasters with a magnetic ray, from a laboratory devoted to turning captive Africans into giant enslaved brutes. That second part is not incidental colour — the racial politics here are ugly even by 1935's standards, and worth naming rather than quietly skipping past. Taken as pure delirium it is the most deranged thing in the collection: lightning arcs, rubber caverns, and William "Stage" Boyd devouring the scenery whole.

Chosen print (2026-08-23): Archive.org item PhotosbyHaroldTheLostCity12ChaptersCombined — 9.05 GB MPEG · 640x480 · 225.3 min.

All twelve chapters combined into a single file. The uploader states that redundant credits and recaps were trimmed between chapters, which accounts for the 225 minutes against a 232-minute listing — a serial's runtime always depends on how much recap footage a print retains. Worth confirming at the eye-pass that the trimming took only recaps and no story.

No chapter-set candidate was found for this serial, so unlike The Phantom Empire and Radar Men from the Moon it ships as one file rather than twelve. At 5.4 Mbps it is also a markedly higher bitrate than the chapter sets those two ship at.

Watch-through done (2026-08-25): all twelve chapter cards run in order in the combined file, and the trimming between them takes only recaps.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1935 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1962–64 contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.