Frank Capra’s version of James Hilton’s novel opens with half an hour of riot, hijack and blizzard that still grips, then settles into a paradise where the plot sits down and listens. Ronald Colman keeps it civil; the speeches keep it long.
Frank Capra spent the mid-thirties making comedies about decent men in indecent towns, and then he turned to James Hilton’s novel about a valley where nobody grows old. Lost Horizon is his plea for peace, made in 1937 with the next war plainly in view, and it is two films. The first is a kidnapping adventure that still grips. The second is a long, soft-spoken argument for moderation, and the film loves the argument more than we did.
The opening half-hour is the best thing in it. Baskul is burning, a mob is at the airfield, and the diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) is getting the last of the Europeans onto the last plane out. Joseph Walker shoots the evacuation in hard night light, torches and headlamps and a propeller wash that flattens everyone who gets near it. Once the plane is up the passengers notice that the pilot is not their pilot, that the sun is on the wrong side, and that they are flying into mountains with no fuel to get back. Gene Milford and Gene Havlick cut this stretch tight, and Dimitri Tiomkin keeps the score down to a pulse under the engines. The crash and the walk through the snow that follows are properly cold; we could feel the wind, and we had stopped noticing the sets.
Then the wind stops and the film changes key. Chang (H. B. Warner) meets the survivors in a fur hat, leads them over a pass, and the clouds part on Shangri-La: white walls, long flights of steps, still pools, a lamasery that looks like a Californian resort built by someone who had read about Tibet. Walker lights it with the soft, high, shadowless glow that Hollywood kept for heaven and for women’s close-ups, and Ernest Dryden dresses the inhabitants in pale robes with nothing on them to catch the eye. It is lovely to look at and it is meant to be calming, and it calmed us more than a film should. Within twenty minutes of arrival we were working out how long was left.
The people help. Colman does the whole of Conway with his voice, a tired, humorous instrument that makes even the daftest lines sound like something a sensible man might say after a drink. Edward Everett Horton, as the fossil expert Lovett, and Thomas Mitchell, as the wanted swindler Barnard, are the comedy, and they are the reason the middle hour is bearable: two men from opposite ends of respectability discovering they would rather stay where nobody can reach them. Isabel Jewell gives the dying Gloria a hard, cheap edge that softens without the film underlining it. John Howard, as the brother George, has the thankless job of being the one who wants to leave, and he plays it as a man shouting in a library. Jane Wyatt’s Sondra is mostly a smile and a flock of pigeons with flutes tied to their legs, though the smile is a good one, and Margo’s Maria is the only person in the valley who seems to want anything.
The trouble is the wisdom. Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman’s screenplay hands Shangri-La’s philosophy to the High Lama (Sam Jaffe), an ancient man in a dim room who speaks in whole paragraphs about kindness, moderation and the storm coming for the world outside. Jaffe is made up to look two hundred and delivers every line at the pace of a man who has that long to live. Capra shoots these scenes as sermons, Colman listening in profile, and he plainly believes every word. So did we, more or less; the problem is that the film mistakes agreement for drama. A valley where nothing is at stake is a fine place to live and a poor place to set the second half of a picture, and the script knows it, because it keeps dragging George back in to argue.
Capra had just made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which had the same faith in ordinary decency and put it in a courtroom, where somebody could lose. Here the faith has nowhere to go but into speeches. The version now shown runs 132 minutes, restored after decades of cuts, and a few of those minutes survive only as sound played over still photographs; we found we did not much miss the movement, which is a criticism. See it for the first half-hour, for Colman, and for Horton and Mitchell warming their hands at a fire they have decided not to leave. Sit near the door for the High Lama.
