It’s hard for me to imagine that there’s anyone out there who doesn’t know what Lost Horizon and Shangri-La are, but popular culture changes so fast these days — not to mention what we think of as common knowledge (I once ordered someone out of my presence for never having heard of Bing Crosby) — that I’m sure there are. For their benefit I’ll explain that Lost Horizon was originally a 1933 novel by the English writer James Hiton, and that Shangri-La is its imagining of a secret, almost unreachable little utopia hidden in the mountains of Tibet. (Through a fluke of nature — and the miracle of skillful writing — the mountain encircled Shangri-La enjoys a pleasant climate in a region where it oughtn’t exist.) The idea — couched in the form of an adventure story — was that this would be a repository for all the intellectual and artistic things could be held safe while the world tore itself apart. It was so popular (FDR named Camp David Shangri-La) that it entered the public consciousness. A film, however daunting an undertaking, was inevitable.
By 1936 Frank Capra was a director of such clout that he was able to convince Columbia’s Harry Cohn to let him bring the novel to the screen — a very expensive undertaking, and an unusual one for Capra. It wasn’t the strangest film Capra ever made — that honor goes to the ersatz-Sternberg The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) — but even with a somewhat Capra-fied adaptation by Robert Riskin (the real architect of Capra’s style), it was worlds away from his usual fare. I won’t say that Capra was out of his depth, but lacked the touch for this type of fantasy, and while he brought the epic quality to the film, he missed…something. He was more at home with the smaller moments when all is said and done. Still, this is easily the definitive version of the story (the less said about the 1973 musical the better). It will be interesting to see if the currently underway reconstruction — the missing footage from the original 1937 release has all been found and is being worked on — reveals that it is a better film than the one we’ve seen.
The Hendersonville Film Society will show Lost Horizon Sunday, Oct. 4, at 2 p.m. in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community (behind Epic Cinemas), 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.
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