Lost Horizon (1937 film)


Lost Horizon

Movie theatre poster for Lost Horizon, artwork by James Montgomery Flagg
Directed by Frank Capra
Produced by Frank Capra
Written by James Hilton (novel)
Robert Riskin
Starring Ronald Colman
Jane Wyatt
John Howard
Music by Dimitri Tiomkin
Cinematography Joseph Walker
Elmer Dyer (aerial)
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Release date(s) March 2, 1937
Running time 132 min.
Language English

Lost Horizon is a 1937 film directed by Frank Capra starring Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt and Sam Jaffe. It tells the story of a group of travelers who find a utopian society in the Himalaya Mountains. The film is based upon the James Hilton novel of the same name and was adapted by Sidney Buchman (uncredited) and Robert Riskin. The Streamline Moderne sets were designed by Stephen Goosson.

Artistically, Lost Horizon evokes many of the themes associated with Capra as an auteur but is somewhat darker and at times, cynical, as with much of his early work.

It was remade as a 1973 musical, which was a notorious critical and commercial failure.

Contents

Plot

Before returning to England to become the new Foreign Secretary, writer, soldier, and diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) has one last task in 1935 China: rescuing 90 westerners in the city of Baskul. He flies out with the last few evacuees, just ahead of armed revolutionaries.

However, the pilot is replaced without their knowledge and their airplane is hijacked. It eventually runs out of fuel and crashes deep in the Himalayas, killing their abductor. The group is rescued by Chang (H.B. Warner) and taken to Shangri-la, an idyllic valley sheltered from the bitter cold. The contented inhabitants are led by the mysterious High Lama (Sam Jaffe).

Initially anxious to return to "civilization", most of the newcomers grow to love the place, including paleontologist Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton), swindler Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), and terminally ill Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell), who miraculously seems to be recovering. Conway is particularly enchanted, especially when he meets Sondra (Jane Wyatt), who has grown up in Shangri-la. However, Conway's younger brother George (John Howard) and Maria (Margo), another beautiful young woman they find there, are determined to leave.

Conway eventually has an audience with the High Lama and learns that his arrival was no accident. The founder of Shangri-la is said to be hundreds of years old, preserved, like the other residents, by the magical properties of the paradise he has created, but is finally dying and needs someone wise and knowledgeable in the ways of the modern world to keep it safe. Having read Conway's writings, Sondra believed he was the one, and the Lama agreed with her. The old man names Conway as his successor and then peacefully passes away.

George refuses to believe the Lama's fantastic story and is backed up by Maria. Uncertain and torn between love and loyalty, Conway reluctantly gives in to his brother and they leave, taking Maria with them. After several days of grueling travel, she becomes exhausted and falls face down in the snow. They discover that she has become an old woman and died. Her departure from Shangri-la had restored Maria to her true age. Horrified, George loses his sanity and jumps to his death.

Conway continues on and eventually meets up with a search party sent to find him, though the ordeal has caused him to lose his memory of Shangri-la. On the voyage back to England, he remembers everything; he tells his story and then jumps ship. The searchers track him back to the Himalayas, but are unable to follow him any further. In the final scene, Conway returns to Shangri-la.

Cast

Lost scenes

According to Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, Frank Capra personally burned the first two reels (about 20 minutes of exposition) after a disastrous preview. This footage has never been found.

No complete original print of the shortened movie is known to have survived, as several reels of the original nitrate negative deteriorated in the late 1960s. In 1942, inspired by a comment by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the film was re-released as The Lost Horizon of Shangri-La in a truncated form to accommodate its placement on a double feature bill. As a result, the film lost what film critic Leslie Halliwell described as "twelve vital minutes," an editorial decision which softened the pacifistic tone for a wartime audience.[1][2] In 1952, a version of the film trimmed to 92 minutes was released[1] which aimed to downplay the supposedly Communist themes associated with utopia, as well as to limit the sympathy shown towards the Chinese, whose relationship with the American government grew strained in the years following World War II. In all, a total of twenty-seven minutes was eventually cut.

A combination of the collapse of the production code and an interest in restoring old films resulted in an attempt in the 1970s to piece together an original print of the film. As is often the case, this meant examining archives of early Hollywood films overseas, where reels were frequently neglected. According to an introduction in the print shown on Turner Classic Movies, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Columbia Pictures have restored as much as possible. All 132 minutes of the original soundtrack have been recovered; however, only 125 minutes of film footage could be found, and some of it is faded and fuzzy. As to the seven minutes of missing film footage, a combination of publicity photos of the actors in costume (taken during filming) and still frames copied from elsewhere in the film is shown while the soundtrack plays.

Production

Black and white

Scenes of the avalanche and the vast frozen landscape of the Himalayas came from a black and white documentary. According to Frank Capra Jr., the director's son, Lost Horizon would have been filmed in color, but because the only suitable stock footage was in black and white, his father decided to shoot his movie that way.[3]

Locations

According to film historian Kendall Miller in the documentary bonus feature on the Lost Horizon DVD, the exterior of the lamasery was built on the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, California, and took a month and a half to construct. The outdoor scenes showing the daily lives of villagers and Conway and Sondra's horseback ride were filmed in Sherwood Forest (Westlake Village), north of Los Angeles, except for the waterfall scene, which was shot in Palm Springs, California. An aerial shot of Ojai Valley taken from an outlook on Highway 150 was used in the scene where Chang points out Shangri-la to Conway. The Tibetan high plateau where the hijacked plane lands for refueling was a dry lake bed on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert in Victorville, California, a location also used for John Ford's Stagecoach.[4] The Sierra Nevada Mountains served as the Himalayas during the shots of the plane's flight.

The movie is notable for the visible breath of the actors in the scenes inside the frigid, crashed aircraft and on the frozen trek to Shangri-La. These sequences were some of the first to be filmed inside the Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage Warehouse, at a temperature between 20-24 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5-7 degrees Celsius).[4]

Academy Awards

Awards
Nominations

References

  1. ^ a b Lost Horizon entry at The Missing Link. Retrieved 2008-05-11.
  2. ^ Halliwell, Leslie (1982). Halliwell's Hundred. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 180-183. ISBN 0684174472. 
  3. ^ Kevin Lewis. "Topic of Capra-Cohn / The Battle Over 'Lost Horizon'". Editors Guild Magazine. http://www.editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/archives/0507/columns_history.htm. 
  4. ^ a b "Doc Spotlight". The Chicago Maroon. April 23, 2002. http://www.chicagomaroon.com/online_edition/print/7617. 

External links

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