.

Director: Frank Capra
Screenwriter: Robert Riskin

By Roderick Heath

Frank Capra’s name has long held a stature denied to all but a few other filmmakers, as not merely famous but synonymous with a specific style of cinema and paradigm of popular culture. The Capraesque as it’s generally understood is a zone of general humanist sentiment and specific, homey Americana, of outmatched dreamers and everyday yearners pitted against tyrannies both embodied by individuals and embedded entire social blocs and systems, of hazy but substantial idealism and nostalgia pitted against a merciless but also ridiculous present, of small virtues pitched against monoliths of power and greed. Capra’s most famous and emblematic films came in a nearly unbroken string in a white-hot period of creativity, one even World War II couldn’t halt entirely even if it finally foiled him in other ways – It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936), Lost Horizon, You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) – are often cited as evergreen examples not just of old-time movie greatness, but of something pure and lost in regards to Hollywood cinema’s grasp on its own, nominal ideal of finding a pure connection with the hopes and fears of the audience.

Of course, that’s only part of the story of Capra’s career judged as a whole, and his movies, like the man, were more complex and strange than often given credit for. But Capra, who had come to the United States with his family as a five-year-old from Sicily, could certainly point to himself as an exemplar of the potential and vitality celebrated in American life. His family quickly made their home in Los Angeles at the end of the migrant trail. Capra’s energy and intelligence helped him work his way through college on an engineering degree, before serving in World War I, a stint that ended when he fell victim to the Spanish flu pandemic. He spent several years struggling in odd jobs and wandering around the western states, contending with the problem of being the best-educated person in his family but wedged between classes, communities, and expectations. He experienced bouts of depression as a result, and the poles of his nature as well as experience would later be wound deeply into his movies. Finally, whilst working as a bookseller in San Francisco, he saw a newspaper article about a film producer starting a studio in the city, and talked the producer into giving him a shot at making a short film, claiming experience in moviemaking he had only actually had before in high school. Still, he did well enough that he was able to get more movie work, soon returning to Los Angeles to work for producer Harry Cohn. With his talents as a gag writer soon particularly prized, Capra collaborated with major comedy impresarios and stars of the moment like Mack Sennett, Hal Roach, and Harry Langdon. He made his feature directing debut with Langdon, The Strong Man (1926). Their eventual creative split proved ruinous to Langdon, whilst Capra went back to work at Cohn’s studio, now called Columbia Pictures.

Capra’s technical education and professional zeal proved receptive and able to capitalise on the jarring shift in the movie industry towards talkies, and after some early box office disappointments he became so reliable that Cohn started featuring Capra’s name before the title, a rare honour for a director at the time. His first full talkie, The Younger Generation (1929), signalled where he would later head, with its quasi-autobiographical interest in social experience and ethnic and class boundaries, and he tried his hand at different genres, including the adventure film Dirigible (1931) and the dreamy, not-quite-interracial romance drama The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). In this period he connected with two vital and constant collaborators – cinematographer Joseph Walker and screenwriter Robert Riskin. The Oscar-wreathed success of It Happened One Night, a film that cemented the stardom of his actress discovery Claudette Colbert and her costar Clark Gable, also anointed Capra as perhaps Hollywood’s most prestigious director at the time, and gave him the clout to become his own producer and control his projects. Lady For A Day (1933) signalled Capra’s oncoming turn towards more directly engaging the idea of movies as a kind of animated zone of sublimation for the audience. Mr. Deeds Goes To Town laid down the template Capra would recapitulate several times, with his eccentric but amiable and upright hero from the sticks becoming the target for malicious manipulations but eventually winning through with aspects of both ironic luck and dogged determination.

Laboured attempts to recreate the Capraesque have permeated movie screens over the years, but even Steven Spielberg has never quite nailed it. At its height, Capra’s filmmaking presented a fascinating, and practically inimitable, fusion of realism and fantasy: the edge of heightened melodrama and wish-fulfilment in his most famous movies wouldn’t work at all if it wasn’t couched in his other, counterpoint sensibilities. His comedy schooling and ability invested even his darkest and most maudlin movies with constant flashes of wit and behavioural fascination, and his improvisatory technique gave scope to building sequences and performances with skittish energy, unfolding with a rigorously observed sense of milieu and Walker’s unobtrusive camerawork: his movies looked and felt subtly different to any other Hollywood filmmaker, despite Capra’s lack of interest in showy effects. The deeper quality that gives films like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and It’s A Wonderful Life their enormous power, however, lies in the way they veer with outsized, neurotic, almost mythic intensity towards poles of darkness and light. The former film, eternally iconic its expression of patriotic faith, is nonetheless couched in a fuming sense of corruption and the inherent awfulness of defying vested interests and plutocrats, building to scenes of plucky kids trying to help the hero and getting beaten up by goons for their pains. The latter sees hero George Bailey on the edge of suicide before being saved, first by the angel Clarence and then his community, travelling through an expressionist nightmare zone in between.

Lost Horizon is unusual amongst Capra’s heyday films, not only as a largely faithful adaptation of a popular novel and swerve out of Capra’s usual territory in both setting and characters, but one that for the most part, avoids the manic-depressive swings of his other films: it not only lacks a stage for Capra to animate the psychic struggle of his other work, but deliberately excludes it, except at the very start and end, when callous reality kicks back into operation. That lack might indeed be to its detriment, dramatically speaking, but it’s also part of its peculiar and still near-unique mystique and appeal, and moreover one that plugs into Capra’s recurring concerns in a particularly interesting way. Perhaps the deepest creative strand connecting Capra’s major works is that, whilst they never indulge any kind of plain metatextual quality, they are all right down at the bottom metaphors for themselves as acts of cinema, for watching movies or experiencing connection through art, deeply concerned with narrative and storytelling as communal acts and personal testimonies. Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington explicitly engage with the difficulty, and necessity, of their abashed everyman heroes articulating their stories, the idea of civic life as an experience defined by the telling of stories, where the best and most persuasive one is also the truest, but not, alas, the loudest. You Can’t Take It With You pivots on a jam session that creates an understanding between men representing different ways of life. It’s A Wonderful Life writes out multiple versions of George’s life and that of his town before choosing an ending that rings as particularly joyous because of, and not in spite of, its relativity and absence of permanent reassurance; life, it says, is for everyone a succession of stumbles between poles of happiness and agony.

Capra’s politics were infamously jumbled on a personal level – the director who stood for the everyman and underdog in his movies to a degree that often makes him seem like the great artistic herald of New Deal-era progressive sentiment and often worked with later-to-be-blacklisted talents was a conservative Republican who hated government welfare and intervention, and carried a picture of Mussolini in his wallet for a time in the 1930s as an expression of Italian pride. Capra’s passion for the theatre of political life excelled any real ideas, and like Charles Dickens, an artist he shared many traits with (kinship most obvious on It’s A Wonderful Life, retelling A Christmas Carol as if it befell Bob Cratchitt rather than Scrooge), Capra didn’t experience the political in terms of ideas but of personalities. Lesson learnt, he later oversaw the production of the famous World War II propaganda film Why We Fight series, of which it was later said didn’t simply convey American war policy to the public but helped define it for the government too; much later he lived up to the credo explored in Lost Horizon by becoming a pacifist against the Vietnam War. Lost Horizon at once extends and critiques this aspect of Capra’s art by explicitly defining his ideal of cinema as an island of safe dreaming and fulfilment between duels with reality.

The start of the film even takes off from where The Bitter Tea of General Yen finished, with western refugees fleeing a China then falling apart, whilst reengaging with its odd orientalist fantasia of escaping the seamy, unsatisfying, banal present into a zone close to timeless and stateless. Capra and Riskin revised the source novel by James Hilton considerably whilst retaining the essential, alluring notion at the heart of the story: a locale, somewhere in the Kunlun Mountains practically inaccessible to the outside world, that is a veritable demi-paradise, a place called Shangri-La. Hilton was a British author who after years of struggle had recently broken through with another book before publishing Lost Horizon, which drew on his own travels to the Himalayas: he went on to write two more novels that would serve as the basis for famous movies, Goodbye Mr. Chips and Random Harvest, and also, as a screenwriter, worked on George Cukor’s Camille (1936) and Mrs. Miniver (1943) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). The novel, whilst initially slow to sell, suddenly became the first mass market paperback hit.

In the four years that elapsed between the book’s publication and the making of Capra’s film, world politics had only degenerated, giving the story’s expression of desire for utopia all the more urgency, an urgency that cross-pollinated with Capra’s distinctive mixture of politically spasmodic idealism and general, airy humanism. Hilton had drawn the notion for Shangri-La from the folklore of the Himalayan region and Buddhist tradition, but the name Shangri-La, derived from the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, immediately become lodged in the language as a synonym for a fanciful, eternally desired and unobtainable place of perfection. Capra’s knowing, personally invested approach to the book is signalled when Lost Horizon’s protagonist, Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), keeps hearing strange, seemingly magical music when he encounters the lovely Sondra (Jane Wyatt), only to eventually learn it comes from flutes she’s tied to a flock of trained birds that follow her around. At once Conway is in a real world where the rules of cause and effect remain in effect, but also one touched with elements of the surreal and the beguilingly bizarre, and a sense of the elastic kinship between the earthbound and the otherworldly is carefully woven; Capra is somehow at once kidding the viewer and drifting happily with us into the fantasy with us. Title cards after the credits swiftly gingerly deal with the prospect of a sop to communal dreaming and a sceptical awareness of it, as it notes the idea of personal idylls on various scales: “Sometimes he calls it Utopia. Sometimes the Fountain of Youth. Sometimes merely ‘that little chicken farm.’”

The same title cards describe the movie’s hero Conway as “England’s ‘Man of the East’ — Soldier, diplomat, public hero.” The deliberation behind Capra’s sense of personal connection is emphasised by the way Capra and Riskin revise the source, which starts in Raj India, to China, with a title card informing us of the place and time with documentary-like rigour – Baskul, the night of March 10, 1935. The opening scene of Lost Horizon is also a vital example of Capra’s raw filmmaking talent, offering stuff that Howard Hawks or Michael Curtiz would have been proud of, in the frantic staging and shooting of Conway’s efforts to evacuate foreign nationals. Capra encapsulates an entire socio-political moment and paradigm in his opening shot: hundreds of people running across a field at night, the light of a burning city at their back, the refugees running from chaos with their worlds reduced to what they can carry. This sort of scene was happening and would happen for the next decade all around the world, and recur with awful likenesses right up until this moment. Conway, a professional English diplomat assigned to evacuate westerners from a Chinese state becoming engulfed by civil strife, is first glimpsed carrying a child and leading refugees out from the airport terminal to a plane. The frantic and desperate action sees Conway trying to get the mostly frightened and anxious foreigners out on planes that dash in and out ahead of the ever-increasing crowd of refugees.

Capra offers the first glimpse of Conway in a sublimely staged tracking shot, moving ahead of and with Colman as he pushes through the crowd, immediately informing us who this man is – unflinchingly humane, a leader, someone who gets things done in the midst of chaos and collapse, Conway is the essential civilised being. Which also sets in motion the story that follows as above all his experience, assuring the viewer that Conway isn’t some effete dreamer, crude bureaucrat, or ivory tower intellect, but a man not only deeply involved in the world but a paragon of that world, whilst nonetheless proving morally and existentially exhausted by it. That Conway is charged with only aiding non-locals is something he later muses on with rueful, disgusted amusement: “Did you say we saved ninety white people?” Conway questions after getting tipsy following the escape: “Did you say that we left 10,000 natives down there to be annihilated? No. No, you wouldn’t say that. They don’t count.” Judging by the quip he makes to a fellow English diplomat over the radio about looking after his liver, Conway’s talent as an envoy is enhanced by a wry sense of conspiratorial humour. The last few precious westerners are a panicky mass assailing Conway in choreographed mass; only Gloria (Isabel Jewell), the brassy blonde sitting solo and cradling a handkerchief with suggestive import, refuses to be evacuated with the other women ahead of the remaining men, commenting with peerless cynicism, “You better take some of those squealing men with you first – they might faint on you. I’ll wait.”

So Gloria is one of the last to be hustled aboard the plane that proves the final flight out of Baskul, fleeing along with Conway, his younger brother and aide George (John Howard), superficially amicable traveller Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), and anxious amateur palaeontologist Alexander P. Lovett (Edward Everett Horton). Capra’s grip on the details amidst this flurry of madcap action is precise, from the plane’s pilot being assaulted in the cockpit by an unseen figure and replaced to Conway pushing Lovett back off the plane thinking he’s one of the locals trying to hijack that plane, only to leap back to grab him up; meanwhile George socks an actual would-be-hijacker trying to sock his brother with a beam. The plane takes off whilst machine gunners on pursuing vehicles try to shoot it down. Conway responds to the escape, and the spectacle of the whole scene, by getting sensibly drunk, whilst the small, motley band of accidental plane-mates graze against each-other – the glibly jesting Barnard irritates the uptight Lovett, particularly by insisting on calling him “Lovey,” commencing a teasing kind of queer banter between the pair. Gloria remains spiky and aloof, plainly very ill and resentful; Lovett meanwhile reveals he has discovered a rare fossil he expects will get him a knighthood, much to Barnard’s amusement. George laughingly boasts of how he expects to bathe in in his brother’s reflected glory, but Conway muses with acidic good-humour and increasing tipsiness on his profession and its meaning in the world, particularly his secret sense of how international diplomacy works: “Everybody wants something for nothing. If you can’t get it with smooth talk, you send your army in.”

Conway’s cynical, world-weary, distinctly antiwar pronouncements were cut out from the film’s World War II-era reissue, not that surprisingly perhaps, but with a damaging impact that viewers of the time recognised and took decades to be reversed. Indeed, for a film that eventually became an emblem of don’t-make-‘em-like-that-anymore classic Hollywood filmmaking from a great director, Lost Horizon had a rough time in both making and release, and doesn’t exist today in the complete and proper form Capra delivered. The budget Cohn gave Capra was the biggest ever initially slated for a movie to that point, but Capra still managed to more than double it. Capra intended a grand and thoughtful epic, but the unwieldy preview cut, purportedly over three hours, proved a disaster with the test audience. Capra, after some soul-searching, cut it down to just over two hours, but the film failed to make back its cost until its reissue in the 1940s. Many cuts were made to the movie over the years, starting with Cohn’s efforts to make the runtime more manageable when the movie was floundering at the box office. Today many of the cuts are plugged with some noticeable shifts to lesser-quality stock and others only plugged with interpolated recreations utilising original audio over still photos.

Lost Horizon as a story superficially obeys the precepts of a common kind of adventure tale, with an initially mysterious hook when it comes to how these particular strangers finish up in a strange land. The fateful journey the five western refugees find they’re on takes up the first half-hour, a passage that exercises Capra’s finest gifts in alternating pace and tone – war movie drama gives way to character comedy and survival drama. Barnard realises the plane is flying in the wrong direction, heading west instead of east towards Shanghai, and soon the refugees are confronted with the fact that the original pilot has been supplanted by an armed and taciturn man (Val Duran), and they’re forced to remain passive even when he lands for an apparently planned rendezvous with a steppe tribe, who have fuel waiting to feed into the plane’s tanks before they set off again. Finally the plane, winging over high mountains, runs out of fuel and the pilot makes a crash-landing: the pilot is killed but the others are unharmed and seem to be facing either death through cold or exposure or a hike out of the mountains likely also to kill them. It seems purely by chance that a search party led by the thin, aged, polite Chang (H.B. Warner) descends to the plane and brings the survivors up from the ice- and wind-ravaged valley along a rugged, arduous trail. Finally they pass through a cleft in the rocky flank of a mountain and enter a high valley that is peaceful and sheltered, free of the brutal cold beyond, with a large and palatial lamasery built on bluffs overlooking the idyllic-seeming farming country called the Valley of the Blue Moon, where the local populaces live a free and easy lifestyle. The interlopers are hosted by Chang at the lamasery. As Conway talks with Chang, he starts to apprehend Shangri-La is more than merely a nicely sheltered locale, but a veritable Eden where people age far more slowly than in the outside world, an amazing quirk allowed by the fine balance of natural elements ruling over the valley and the ease of the lifestyle.

The three outsiders who arrive with the brothers Conway, Barnard, Lovett, and Gloria, are stock types being toggled simultaneously towards the more completely archetypal by the story setting and towards studies in behavioural contrast for a director rooted in comedy. Eventually it’s revealed that Barnard is really Chalmers Bryant, a former builder and entrepreneur whose business collapsed, taking with it the money of many small investors, including Lovett, and left him reviled as a fraud: Barnard has already explored the poles of hero, victim, and villain recurring in Capra’s moral and social scheme. Gloria is the coded prostitute and classical hard-luck case, furious with the world and men in particular, shrieking with theatrical bravura at the twists of fate that have seen her diagnosed with a fatal illness – tuberculosis, likely – only to then face riots, kidnapping, and crashing with hysterical valour. Lovett is the man who’s thrown away his life through his intellectual obsession, manifest in the bit of ancient bone he expects to bring him some kind of glory, but who’s otherwise timid and flighty and old before his time. George Conway contrasts his brother not merely in being younger but in still delighting in the worldly stature Robert has and itching to earn some of it for himself: he proves the character for whom the elusive promise of Shangri-La chafes and finally infuriates, particularly as it becomes clear that leaving the place is not quite impossible, but extremely difficult and dangerous. This becomes even more alarming when Chang lets slip that

Capra and Riskin kept the essentials of the novel but rearranged many elements, as well as greatly simplified its layered storytelling, with only the film’s peculiar last movement gesturing at the reported style of Hilton’s narrative, the deliberately distanced, anecdotal approach to mediate the fancy. George’s equivalent in the book, Mallinson, was Conway’s vice-consul rather than brother; Gloria’s analogue was a complete opposite, a highly prim and religious woman who wanted to proselytise the Shangri-La folk, and Lovett was entirely added. The film places more emphasis on Shangri-La as a place to which the interlopers are receptive and need on levels they did not expect rather than a place to indulge their obsessions. Other changes sidestep anxieties about interracial romance in ‘30s Hollywood: Conway’s love interest in the book was Chinese, and her narrative function was split for the movie. Making the Mallinson character into Conway’s brother was both in keeping with Capra’s interest in family and a more literal version of the “brother’s keeper” theme that finally weighs heavily enough on Conway to leave Shangri-La when that’s the last thing he wants to do.

George’s unease quickly slides towards a rampage after he encounters the beautiful young woman, Maria (Margo), living in the lamasery: George starts threatening Chang and other denizens with a gun soon after in a fit of hysteria, claiming that he and the other outsiders have in fact been kidnapped by the design of Shangri-La’s denizens rather than having been accidentally saved by them. Eventually Conway learns this is essentially true, although events weren’t supposed to play out as they did, and everyone who arrived with him was essentially dragged along for the ride. Chang tells Conway about a Belgian missionary named Perrault who stumbled into the valley in the late 1700s and, after cutting off his own frostbitten leg, recovered to build the lamasery. Perrault, moreover, instituted Shangri-La in its complete and current version, as a place with a sense of mission as both a last refuge from and for civilisation, storing up knowledge, thought, and creativity, with an eye to one day bequeathing some new and exalting in turn to the outside world. To this end, Conway himself has been brought to the place, not to exploit his political status but his intellectual curiosity and idealism as expressed in his written work. After knocking out his brother to halt his rampage, Conway insists Chang explain what’s going on, and Chang replies that he was just about to take him to see the High Lama. Ushered in to see the ancient, wizened Lama (Sam Jaffe), Conway, noting the old man only has one leg, immediately realises this must be Perrault himself, somehow still alive and hundreds of years old. The Lama makes his appeal to Conway to aid in his great project, and Conway is swayed.

Lost Horizon is a rarefied work, difficult to describe in terms of genre. It’s often listed in science fiction movie surveys. It might be more easily seen as a straight fantasy, but the storyline insists on the absence of any aspect of the supernatural or surreal behind the place, beyond the most ethereal intimations. The idea that Shangri-La benefits from occupying a zone of precisely balanced natural forces certainly could be described in compromise as speculative. It is, strangely, possible to feel the impact of Lost Horizon reverberating today through tales that belong more squarely to the science fiction genre – Avatar (2009), for instance, with its fantastical yearning for an unsullied world, and with its closing image of transformative homecoming at once grand and wistful, reproduces the end of Lost Horizon in its fashion. Indeed perhaps even, in its, way, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a variation. Similarly, whilst the film is flecked with aspects of comedy, romance, adventure, and melodrama, none of these aspects dominate; nor does it become a spiritual parable or philosophical meditation, although it nibbles around the edges of these, as well as similarities to a particular kind of gothic horror story. Lots of stories involve a similar sort of plot where hapless travellers find themselves flung into a lost, strange world where the normal rules of time and reality seem suspended, but Lost Horizon deliberately avoids the common reflexes of those, save right at the end when leaving the enchanted place has a very definite and terrible effect. Many of those sorts of tales have outsider heroes crashing in upon malign regimes that serve as parables for political tyranny or religious fanaticism, but Lost Horizon diffuses and inverts that motif, even if George remains locked in in his own personal version of that kind of story.

Indeed, Lost Horizon embraces that kind of ambivalence, which can stretch out to the ambivalence of the audience: Capra is sensible enough to know that what looks like paradise to one person may very well look like hell to another. It also came at a time when it was something of a trope for pulp and comic book heroes to travel to the high Himalayas to learn arcane and amazing arts from wise old lamas – e.g. The Shadow and Doctor Strange – but Lost Horizon pulls apart that trope too: nobody gains any new aptitude or gift from going to Shangri-La beyond a longer than usual life and the capacity to live that life to the utmost. This is also what’s most engaging and interesting about Lost Horizon, that it goes into a fictional zone usually built around physical action and aggressive animations of that fantastic and instead dedicates itself to the difficult task of sustaining something more nebulous and rarefied. That Capra doesn’t entirely pull it off is perhaps inevitable, and the film has self-awareness in that regard. Not long after the westerners arrive in Shangri-La Chang visits Gloria as she writhes and coughs up her lungs on her bed. When she talks of killing herself by launching herself at the foot of a mountain with; “Why don’t you try looking at the top?” “Don’t try that cheap second-hand stuff on me!” Gloria bawls, mimicking the audience’s scepticism over such a neat positive bromide, whilst the scene and sound of Gloria’s illness strike a strikingly similar note to what Ingmar Bergman would go for in The Silence (1963) and Cries and Whispers (1973) with his wheezing, dying heroines: Capra roots his fantasy here most effectively in a sense of the gruelling reality of living. This scene as it exists now is also one that’s been patched together, something that oddly amplifies its intended tone.

Gloria, true to Chang’s prediction, begins to recover as she adapts to Shangri-La’s healing influence, noted, in corny fashion, by Barnard when he notices she looks great even after abandoning her makeup: “You look a million percent better – wholesome kinda, and clean. You take a tip from me and don’t you ever put that stuff on your face again. Why it’s like hiding behind a mask.” Which earns a laughing rebuke from Lovett, who notes Barnard’s own reticence about his identity, which prompts Barnard to open up about his real name and flight from the law. “I knew I had a reason for hating you,” Lovett declares after Barnard explains himself, musing on the hard-earned money he lost investing in Barnard’s failed enterprise, but Barnard goes on calmly musing on the ironies of his life as a guy who “starts out as a plumber” and becomes a tycoon and then a reviled fugitive – somehow both George Bailey and Potter at once. Eventually, of course, he and Lovett are swayed away from their grievances and obsessions by the hospitality of Shangri-La and its ladies, getting drunk and amusing the local children: Lovett scribbles a note about “sowing some wild oats” in his diary whilst Barnard is distracted from the gold veins when he turns his plumbing knowledge towards improving the water supply to the valley. A tentative romance between Barnard and Gloria is signalled towards the end – one element that presumably hit the cutting room floor, and it feels like a pity – as Gloria elects to stay with him in Shangri-La, turning down George’s appeals to take their one chance to escape for years. Lovett meanwhile decides to turn both his teaching and geology skills to the benefit of the local children, much to Chang’s ever so slightly bemused pleasure.

Hilton’s concept derived elements from older fictional utopias: like Voltaire’s El Dorado, Shangri-La has huge quantities of mineral wealth but hold as valueless, here in the form of gold deposits, which the locals neglect having no need for it, and only use for trading. In a less exalted manner it could be described as an elaborate version of the Big Rock Candy Mountain of folk song reportage, the ironic realm of bliss at the end of every trail of privation. The entire premise of Shangri-La is the general state of natural plenty as well as profound good health the inhabitants enjoy: Chang comments that the healing power of the place stems from the lack of want and worry. The fact that Shangri-La’s lamasery and other elements of modern civilisation weren’t dreamt of until Perrault’s arrival hints that the price paid for Shangri-La’s absence of want is also the absence of the things that drive on development and social evolution, at least until Perrault made cultural attainment a goal. The film is fuzzy about the social set-up in Shangri-La, where most of the populace seem to lead traditional, agrarian lives, with their little abode of the priestly and intelligentsia strata above all, an ironically idealised medieval world-unto-itself, although the way everyone proves to have unexpected language skills hints that generally the Shangri-La citizens live as they do by choice despite great education: they are organs of a near-literal body politic. Chang explains that, as with the balance of nature that makes the place so idyllic, moderation is the ruling ethos: “We rule with moderate strictness, and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience,” Chang quips, whilst explaining local manners and morals, which include an attitude of forbearance in case of romantic triangles, where it’s courtesy for one partner to give way to another if they’re more passionate. “Some man had better get ready to be awfully courteous to me,” Conway comments after catching sight of Sondra, another lovely young lady he keeps seeing around the lamasery, catching his eye when he first approaches the building and making her laugh when he trips over.

Sondra proves to be the reason Conway’s been brought to Shangri-La, as an aficionado of his writing who believed the place could benefit him and vice versa (of course, just how given the incredibly tenuous line of communication with the outside world the Shangri-La folk were able to arrange Conway’s kidnapping complete with refuelling stops is left in the realm of suspended disbelief). Her interest him shades into what is already romance before they officially meet, with Conway’s written self-expression an appeal that Sondra is keen enough to recognise, and she immediately embodying the allure of Shangri-La as a place charged with possibility. Their love affair continues to be enacted at a steadily closing distance, enacted through signs and traces, glimpses and near-meetings, for tantalising if elusive reasons. At one point Conway tries to chase Sondra down on horseback when he sees her out also riding, only for her to elude him and wave from a vantage high over a waterfall. Later Capra tackles a hallowed cliché with roots in Greek myth via standard Hollywood furtive sexuality, as Conway happens upon Sondra whilst she’s bathing naked in a pond, given its own twist as Conway seems to understand the nature of the game they’re playing and erects a scarecrow clothed in Sondra’s discarded clothing. The relationship that begins as a purely intellectual reception communed delicately yet rigorously over the longest trails of human connection is swiftly becomes intensely tactile, even charged with potently kinky hues, as Conway and Sondra play-act aggravatingly inquisitive brat and exasperated parent who wants to “wring her little neck,” a simmering arc of the faintly sadomasochistic inflecting their erotic frisson. This even as they stroll through fairy-tale climes that at once anticipate and satirise a Disney vision of such climes, blossoming tries and flights of birds winging about the lovers and Sondra explaining that trick with the flutes on her trained birds, her engineered feat of wonderment.

For a fairly talky and action-free movie after its early portion, Lost Horizon weaves a powerful visual magic: indeed, this magic lasts when the verbal pearls of wisdom are forgotten. Capra constructs the approach to Shangri-La and the first sight of it with special zeal, with a montage of the survivors and their escorts trudging up the narrow mountain paths, skirting vertiginous drops and battered by a blizzard, accompanied by the intensifying strains of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score. Finally they pass through cleft in the stone which frames both the harsh world without and the becalmed sprawl of Shangri-La in visions of clashing, inscrutable mystique, churning cloud and snow beyond the rickety railing at the trail’s head and the lamasery with its Buddhist-via-Bauhaus chic and the lush valley below. Conway turns from one vista to the other, his amazement clear. Later Capra suggests the mystery and allure of the new place as he films George wandering the corridors of the lamasery, viewed in slightly out-of-focus silhouette amidst pillars and high windows and padding noiselessly on polished tiling – a shot edging towards dreamlike abstraction and violating the by-now ultra-professional Hollywood shooting style. This shot precedes George’s first sight of Maria in her room, a moment that plays out without dialogue as George enters and sits with her in a spellbound state, suggesting the curious touch of the mysterious and unstable to the place and this fateful meeting even as nothing overtly strange manifests.

Maria is also Sondra’s doppelganger: both women who owe their lives to Shangri-La as foundlings rescued after their families died traversing the mountains, although where Sondra is still an actually young if prodigious person, Maria is supposedly very old, and Chang tells Conway she would revert to her true age if she left Shangri-La. Gloria is the sullied, world-ruined contrast to both, until she starts healing under the Shangri-La influence (oddly enough, both Margo and Jewell would be cast together in the Val Lewton-produced, Jacques Tourneur directed film The Leopard Man, 1943, a film that could in its way be seen as Lewton’s deliberate antithesis, just as humanistic and isolated in setting but contending with the irrationality too often gripping people). Where Sondra brings her yearned-for man to Shangri-La, Maria wants to leave with hers: it becomes clear she let slip to George about the kidnapping, and later it’s her testimony that sways Conway into leaving with her and George, when she swears that she’s being held against her will by Chang’s malicious intent, and they’re all the victims of a conspiracy, a charge Conway can’t argue down because, indeed, in another exceedingly clever touch, there is no manifest proof of anything remarkable about Shangri-La: even the tale about Perrault might have been planted for the sake of seductive credulity. The lama who may or may not be Perrault, when he meets with Conway, proves to be an extraordinarily ancient and wizened being who nonetheless quickly ensnares Conway’s imagination and most profound impulses with his beatific vision freed from any specific religious reference point save that “One day the Christian ethic might be fulfilled,” and boils down to, “Be kind.”

That’s the sort of thing that’s easy to tease Lost Horizon about, and indeed much of Capra’s core oeuvre, as a hymn to magical thinking and basic bromides, even as his works signal constantly that they’re both utterly fervent in their messaging and also self-aware enough to tease their own fervour. Something of Capra’s wit in this regard is apparent in Conway’s response to Perrault’s promise of a vastly extended life in Shangri-La: “A prolonged future doesn’t excite me. It would have to have a point. I’ve sometimes doubted whether life itself has any. And if that is so, then long life must be even more pointless. No, I’d need a much more definite reason for going on and on.” Whereupon Perrault draws him into his great project of making Shangri-La a cultural and intellectual ark to whether the storms of ages. In this notion Lost Horizon grasped hold of an instinctual aspect of modern life that’s only grown more painful and urgent ever since, the conviction of an imminent catastrophe where the only redemption will be saving what’s worthwhile of the past: here Lost Horizon gives birth to the post-apocalyptic move genre whilst affecting to look beyond it, to whatever is post the post-apocalypse. More immediately, it’s owing to the confluence of Capra’s direction, Jaffe’s performance, Tiomkin’s scoring, and the work of the technical team that the sequences where Conway talks with Perrault seem to convey some aspect of profundity and wonderment.

Moreover, as it unfolds Lost Horizon becomes a kind of parable about itself, and about Capra’s kind of art: the ideal, the longed-for, the beloved, is always just over the next hill, and worse yet might be something we find and yet don’t truly recognise until it’s too late. It almost goes without saying that Lost Horizon is a crucial inception point and set text for the later Counterculture and New Age movements, with longing eyes turned towards lofty mountain peaks capped by remote monasteries open to people fleeing an exhausted and exhausting world. The film itself and its source might be regarded as a bridging point between a notable strand of Victorian-era utopianism and spiritual seeking and more modern varieties. Shangri-La in Capra’s conception is a place at once concrete and articulating, like much of Capra’s work, a very specific and powerful feeling whilst never really making its mind up about what it is and means. The Shangri-La lamasery itself and surrounds likewise can strike one as a dreamlike outpost of a civilisation that never was or a banal resort in faux-exotic wrapping. The remoteness and isolation of Shangri-La are the only things that can sustain them: this world would lose its sainted balance with the slightest pressure. But Capra knows this, and it’s the sense of delicacy about the place that animates it on the dreamlike level, the way its ideals are so essential and its existence so beholden to precisely counteracting physical and spiritual forces

Capra had an ideal leading man in Colman, an actor who seemed to practically personify in his heyday the movie-going public’s general ideal of an Englishman. A stage actor whose early movie roles were poorly received because he carried over a histrionic acting style, Colman was also a World War I veteran who had weathered a gas attack that damaged his lungs, and likely contributed to his early death from a lung infection in 1958 (particularly sad given that some others involved in making Lost Horizon, including Capra and Wyatt, seemed to imbibe a little of the Shangri-La spirit and lived into their nineties). Colman had clawed his way to stardom in the silent era but his career didn’t really start hitting its heights until sound came and he first played Bulldog Drummond, the canonical man of action who on the page was supposed be pug-faced and boyishly brutal, but as played by Colman became a suave knight in modern clothes. Colman was good-looking and dashing, but with a gentlemanly poise and limpid, slightly haunted eyes, backed up by his inimitable, purring voice that seemed to express the essence of the romantic and thoughtful: later he’d be nominated for and eventually win Oscars for playing flailing, damaged men in Random Harvest and A Double Life (1948). Conway as a role exploits the two facets of Colman’s screen persona, conjuring the heroic and worldly side at first and later texturing the more idealistic and unexpected aspect of the man with humour and a certain kind of fatalism that’s first signalled in his boozy, not-really-joking monologue on the plane, rueing his inability to escape the world: “Don’t worry, I’ll fall right into line,” he promises George when musing on his role as a statesman. “Personally I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” he comments to Chang, whilst still finding it beholden on him on behalf of his brother and fellow abductees to find out what the hell’s going on.

Later Conway indulges an odd streak of humour, mingled with odd, simmering erotic excitement, when he offers to Sondra his lampooning impression of the worst kind of western tyke constantly bleating “Why?” as the essential, driving question of the evolving rational being whilst being innately absurd. I like the romantic aspect of Lost Horizon, but can see what it tests the patience of some, as Capra takes the idea of a “meet cute” to extremes and draws out the moment of fateful meeting for the couple. But if the larger part of Lost Horizon seems dedicated to regular fantasies – extended youth, beauty, function, and community – the more subtle, and more fundamental, one enacted by Conway and Sondra is one of finally coming to the place and person that has been the allusive and elusive object of life’s efforts. Wyatt as Sondra is enormously appealing, embodying both the elusive romantic ideal and the actuality, intelligence and free spirit, and she and Colman signal the carnality that’s indivisible from their higher-minded attraction. Wyatt’s film career remained sadly patchy even as she continued working for an incredibly long time: when Wyatt turned up decades later playing the mother of Spock in Star Trek she was to a great extent revisiting her role here as emissary linking worlds with her person in a vaguely Asiatic fantasy zone. I wish there was more of Gloria left in the film, as her earthiness and reawakening might have made a strong counterpoint to the meeting-of-true-minds Conway and Sondra pairing. But the scenes between George and Maria hum with a secret power that’s fascinating, Margo projecting the thrill and thrall of having her desires met at last after years of solitude and youth without youth. Capra insinuatingly blends signifiers of sex and a kind of trap when Maria opens a set of high arching gates to call to George, who is squeezed into the narrow space of the film frame. When George finally confronts Conway about the possibility of leaving with the rugged gang of porters, he uses Maria’s testimony to demolish Conway’s credulity about Shangri-La, an intellectual rejection of the heart’s longing, a rejection that also demands rejecting Sondra.

Capra doesn’t entirely conquer all the problems of shifting pace and tone in Lost Horizon, even if he still manages to weave it together with grace and confidence when the material would have defeated lesser talents. Just look at what happened with Charles Jarrot’s 1973 musical remake, a film that seemed to have the right idea in revisiting the material at a time when the zeitgeist was both influenced by and open to its particular vision and also when old Hollywood values had become a source of nostalgia, and did okay when it followed the original beat for beat, but then swerved towards the excruciatingly silly as it did what Capra avoided scrupulously. Capra builds to three great concluding movements that cap the film. The first comes when Conway is told by Perrault that he is finally dying, and wants Conway to take over the leadership of Shangri-La, a role Conway accepts, only to then be confronted by George and Maria and obliged to leave with them. Whilst the citizens of Shangri-La and the valley parade by torchlight to mourn and celebrate the High Lama’s passing, Conway, George and Maria leave, watched anxiously by Chang from a balcony and with Sondra, catching word of their departure too late, chases after her lover with frantic appeal. Capra offers the two salutary perspectives with enormously powerful pathos: Conway halting on the Shangri-La threshold and looking back at the torchlight procession, a sight of mysterious and ritualistic beauty, with storm clouds of the mountains at his back, before turning and reentering the buffeting world; Sondra, stills screaming Conway’s name, halting at the threshold, face lashed by snow.

The second movement seems at first to return the film to the realm of adventure tale, as the three recalcitrants prove a tedious burden to the porters, who eventually start taking shots at them for amusement and to rid themselves of these walking cargo: “As long as they keep on aiming at us we’re safe,” Conway quips, but the gunshots finally start an avalanche that sweeps the porters to their deaths and leaves the three stragglers to continue the journey alone. Maria is ailing, seemingly unused to such exertions, and Conway carries her as a blizzard descends. In one of those moments of moviemaking that sticks like a harpoon, George starts crying, “Look at her face!”, her snow-thrashed visage dangling on his brother’s shoulder now an ancient, haggard visage. Finally, proof of Shangri-La’s wonder and all that they were told about the place, and the awful price Maria has paid for her attempt to deny it. Suddenly we’re out of a tale of beatific utopia and vast unknonws, and plunged into an Edgar Allan Poe tale of illusory beauty and mortal decay in grotesque and immediate alternation, and the realm of the fairy-tale with its mysterious but firm rules and demarcations. George, stricken with hysterical grief, hurls himself off the mountain to his death, and Robert, unable to stop him, is left to trudge his way alone until he collapses and is rescued by some Chinese villagers and soon after located by the explorer Lord Gainsford (Hugh Buckler).

Word soon speeds around the world about Conway’s appearance after a year missing suffering apparent amnesia about his experiences, but then he vanishes again just as he’s about to leave China with Gainsford. Gainsford, after a year chasing Conway, finally returns to London and tells the men in his club about Conway’s sudden recovery of memory and ravings about Shangri-La, and his determined, almost maniacal efforts to return there, with Gainsford last having word of him heading back into the Tibetan mountains on foot. Gainsford’s testimony, delivered within the banal bonhomie of a London gentlemen’s club, proves the most ironic conceivable setting for a testimony about Conway’s struggle, in the heart of the world he eventually chose to reject, but also intensifies the tantalising quality of the very end, as the group of aging establishment men, with Gainsford as the mouthpiece, become longing witnesses to the truth of Conway’s dream: “I believe it,” Gainsford comments, “because I want to believe it.” The strike of their drinks in a toast dissolves into the image of Conway struggling his way up an icy mountain flank, solitary and dwarfed, but rewarded as he again sets eyes on the cleft that frames Shangri-La and the Valley of the Blue Moon, to his stark, beaming joy, and the lamasery bells peal out his homecoming. The ideal signature on a nigh-perfect fantasia, one that took up habitation in a corner of the collective mind, where dreams live. And it’s one that still fulfils its function, fending off objections even as the dreams it provokes only seem to grow in urgency.