10 Marvellous Movie MacGuffins

The ‘Lotus X Formula’ in One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing

In comedy, the MacGuffin can be used in a way that is slightly different than in drama, and this is brilliantly demonstrated in director Robert Stevenson’s 1975 adaptation of the David Forrest novel, The Great Dinosaur Robbery – One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing. Here, the MacGuffin is a microfilm deposited somewhere upon a giant Diplodocus skeleton in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London by Lord Southmere (Derek Nimmo), a Queen’s Messenger.

Lord Southmere is being pursued by a group of Chinese spies who want the microfilm for themselves, because it contains the mysterious ‘Lotus X Formula’. However, while desperately hiding the microfilm on the skeleton before being captured, Lord Southmere crosses paths with his former nanny, Hettie (Helen Hayes) and enlists her assistance. Hettie rallies her nanny-colleagues, who embark on a quest to retrieve the microfilm that involves hiding in a blue whale skeleton, taking on the gang of spies and driving a full-size dinosaur skeleton through the atmospheric, foggy streets of London under cover of darkness.

Throughout the film – notable at the time of its release for featuring a group of capable women saving the day, though it is set within the framework of terrible racism – the nature of the mysterious ‘Lotus X Formula’ is treated as a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, in that it is basically irrelevant. The action motivated by the MacGuffin would be the same, regardless of the content of the microfilm, because it is actually predicated upon the steadfast loyalty of Hettie to her charges, past and present. However, director Stevenson, and writer Bill Walsh deliver the biggest laugh at the end of the film, when they spin the Hitchcock plot device on its head and reveal that the ‘Lotus X Formula’ is actually something entirely unexpected.