Lost Horizon

After a string of highly profitable movies, director Frank Capra knew it was a perfect time to propose to the stingy Columbia Pictures' president Harry Cohn an expensive epic based on James Hilton's runaway 1933 novel best seller. After listening to Capra's pitch, Cohn was all in by financing February 1937 "Lost Horizon."

Capra loved Hilton's epic, but bringing the complex tale about a group of Westerners who are brought to the secret kingdom of Shangri-La deep in the Himalaya Mountains was difficult to translate onto the screen. Cohn initially handed the director a working budget of $1.25 million to make his dream motion picture, a generous amount for one of Hollywood's smaller major film studios.

Capra tasked his writing collaborator Robert Riskin to research the Tibetan culture, its people, architecture and clothing to prepare for the ambitious film. Building 65 sets, including those on the studio's Burbank ranch and inside the huge Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage Warehouse, the construction alone ate up a great chunk of the movie's budget. Complications ballooned the already expensive production, including freezing temperatures in the cold warehouse studio causing the fragile film equipment to crack and shatter. Unanticipated delays totally ten months sent Capra's film crew to shoot Irene Dunne's 1936 "Theodora Goes Wild" before the director was ready to resume.

Retired stage actor A. E. Anson was picked to play the High Lama. Capra telephoned the actor to inform him the part was his. A few hours later, Capra received a call stating that Anson, 56, upon hearing he was going to be the Lama, keeled over and died of a heart attack. Next in line was 58-year-old actor Henry B. Walthall, noted for his lead in D. W. Griffith's 1915 "Birth of a Nation." Just before filming began, he collapsed from an exhausting overloaded schedule on the Warner Brothers set making 1936's 'China Clipper' and died soon after. Capra then cast the youthful Sam Jaffe, 45, in only his third film, as the Lama.

Unusual for Capra he filmed every conceivable angle of each scene, an expensive proposition. Cohn faced a roomful of reels of film that had to be edited down into a coherent movie. At first, Capra's rough cut was six hours, then a few more weeks of work sliced the film to a more manageable three hours. Cohn told his employees to postpone cashing their salary checks for a week since his finances were drying up from "Lost Horizon's" escalating costs. Finally, the studio head yanked Capra out of the editing room and had two editors finish the cutting. Capra took Cohn to court for breaking his contract that gave the director final approval. He claimed the studio wanted a shorter film for more daily theater showings to increase its box office take. Ironically, "Lost Horizon" won the Oscar for Best Editing.

Music composer Dimitri Tiomkin, an aspiring concert pianist, gave up playing once he broke his arm and turned to Hollywood. He credits Capra for giving him his first job, launching a career as one cinema's more prolific scorers of musical sound tracks. The Russian-born Tiomkin earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Musical Score for the movie, and gained his United States citizenship right after its release.

"Lost Horizon's" plot opens with diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) along with a handful of others, including his brother George (John Howard), fleeing a chaotic Chinese revolutionary battle. Unbeknowst to them they hop onto a plane piloted by a hired Shangri-La aviator to bring the diplomat to the remote city to replace the dying High Lama (Jaffe). Robert meets Sondra (Jane Wyatt), the Lama's confidant, who introduces him to all the wonderful things in her land. The highly-respected diplomat faces the difficult decision whether to return to Western civilization or stay in his new-found paradise. The movie is "an artistic tour de force," hailed The Hollywood Reporter, "in all ways, a triumph for Frank Capra." Modern film reviewer Patrick Nash wrote the film "is an epic in every sense of the word. It tells a wonderful story filled with adventure and majesty and it surely ranks among the greatest movies ever to come out of Hollywood's Golden Age."

Unfortunately, "Lost Horizon" lost a pile of money on its initial release, and only recuperated its costs after several re-releases. Besides the Oscar win for Best Editing, it won for Best Art Design for its lavish Streamline Moderne art-deco sets of Shangri-La. The Capra film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting actor (H. B. Warner as Chang), Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing and Best Assistant Director. The American Film Institute nominated "Lost Horizon" for Best Movie, Best Film Score, and Top Ten Fantasy Film. Remarkably, Columbia Pictures revisited the Hilton book by making it into a 1973 musical "Lost Horizon," with Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann. It proved to be a financial disaster.

The second half of the 1930s saw the return of the big picture - bigger budgets, grander ideas, longer runtimes in which to tell a story. But the 30s were also a decade of highly emotional and humanist cinema, fuelled by the hardships of the great depression. Lost Horizon sees what was for the time a rare marriage between burgeoning picture scope, in what was "poverty row" studio Columbia's most expensive production to date, and poignant intimacy in the source novel by James Hilton.

Thank goodness for director Frank Capra, who seemed really able to balance this sort of thing. Capra could be a great showman, composing those beautiful iconic shots to show the magnificent Stephen Goosson art direction off to best advantage. But he also knows how to bring out a touching human story. In some places Capra's camera seems a trifle distant, and is almost voyeuristic as it peeps out through foliage or looming props. But rather than separate us from the people it is done in such a way as to give a kind of respectful distance at times of profound emotion, for example when Ronald Colman comes out of his first meeting with the High Lama. The camera hangs back, just allowing Colman's body language to convey feelings. At other times Capra will go for the opposite tack, and hold someone in a lengthy close-up. In this way we are given to just one facet a character's emotional experience, and it becomes all the more intense for that.

Of course such techniques would be nothing without a good cast. There couldn't really have been anyone better than Ronald Colman for the lead role. Now middle-aged, but still possessed with enough charm and presence to carry a movie, Colman has a slow subtlety to his movements which is nevertheless very expressive. His face, an honest smile but such sad eyes, seems to be filled with all that hope and longing that Lost Horizon is about. Sturdy character actors H.B. Warner and Thomas Mitchell give great support. It's unusual to see comedy player Edward Everett Horton in a drama like this, and comedy players in dramas could often be a sour note in 1930s pictures, but Horton is such a lovable figure and just about close enough to reality to pull it off. The only disappointing performance is that of John Howard, who is overwrought and hammy, but even this works in a way as it makes his antagonistic character seem to be the one who is out of place.

Lost Horizon is indeed a wondrous picture, and one that fulfils its mission statement of being both sweeping and soul-stirring. It appears that Capra, always out for glory, was out to make his second Academy Award Best Picture. But history was to repeat itself. In 1933 he had had his first go at a potential Oscar-winner with The Bitter Tea of General Yen, only for that picture to be ignored and the more modest It Happened One Night to win the plaudits the following year. Lost Horizon won two technical Oscars, but bombed at the box office, but in 1938 the down-to-earth comedy drama You Can't Take it with You topped the box office and won Best Pic.

Lost Horizon was in no way worthy of such a dismissal, and is indeed a bit better than You Can't Take it with You. It was perhaps more than anything a case of bad timing. Audiences were only just starting to get used to two-hour-plus runtimes, especially for movies with such unconventional themes. If you look at contemporary trailers and taglines, you can see it was being pitched as some kind of earth-shattering spectacular, whereas it is more in the nature of an epic drama. For later releases the movie was edited down to as little as 92 minutes. Fortunately, we now have a restored version. The additional material that has been reconstructed is vital for giving depth, not only to the characters, but also to the setting of Shangri-La itself. With hindsight, we can look back on Lost Horizon as a work of real cinematic beauty.

"I believe it because I want to believe it". This one line speaks volumes about what the movie (and the original novel) was trying to say. The concept of Shangri-La, a place where people work and live in peaceful harmony, is as relevant today as it was in the post-World War I era that James Hilton wrote 'Lost Horizon', where the world was still in turmoil following a devastating war and another was on its way.

In these days of war, humanitarian devastation and disease, how many people are there who dream of getting away from it all and living out their lives in a remote paradise just like Shangri-La? The High Lama's words to Conway resonate strongly even today.

"Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality." On a more cinematographic note, the movie is visually stunning in an age before CGI and astronomical budgets. The beauty of Shangri-La, the stunning mountain landscapes and the overall settings of the movie make us believe that such a wonderful place can exist. All the actors are commendable in their portrayals (though some characters are different to those in the original novel) and their interaction with each other add a real sparkle to the movie.

'Lost Horizon' is a beautiful adaptation of James Hilton's masterpiece and captures the very feeling of the novel and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has ever dreamed of escaping from the hectic world in which we live.

I think I was about seven or eight years old when I first saw this film, and has always lingered in the back of my mind. This is pure movie magic of a rare kind, and it is surprising how well it holds up today. The story is handled with just the right balance of seriousness and humour, with fine performances throughout, and the timeless message it sends is truly profound. The middle part may be lacking a bit in pacing, but it is a minor quibble, since this, for my money, is a masterpiece. And it still looks great, with impressive set design and an abundance of atmosphere. The finale is simply sublime, and stays in the mind for a long time afterwards, one of my favorite movie moments of all time. A movie everyone should see.

I watched this film for the first time as a 10 year old and its effects on my willingness to be a optimistic idealist have always been led by my memories of this hope inspiring tribute to the need for the human being to find Heaven in this life. Perhaps Lost Horizon could have been that spark that enabled me to find just that. Like all films from another era do not judge this film for its apparent imperfections, rather for what it offered the audiences of that time (1937), hope that all would be well when man would recognize that his time is always better spent broadening his horizons of understanding. Frank Capra's guides his audiences through danger and turmoil to that place which dreams are made of, when we all make the effort to make it happen.