Lost Horizon 1937

     This film is based on a novel by James Hilton.  The setting of film is 1935, diplomat Robert Conway is trying to rescue 90 Westerners in the city of Baskul, China.  Armed revolutionaries will soon be descending upon those who are left behind.  The passengers don’t know that the pilot has been replaced and the aircraft hijacked.  It runs out of fuel and crashes deep in the Himalayan Mountains.  The crash kills the pilot and the group is rescued by Chang and taken to Shangra-La.  This is an idyllic valley sheltered from the bitter cold mountains by on all sides.  The inhabitants are very content in their lives and the High Lama is their leader.  All of the new arrivals are anxious to return to civilization but they begin to love Shangra-La.  Robert Conway wants to stay but his brother George and Maria a woman he has met are determined and desperate to leave.  Robert is worried that George and Maria won’t make it out of the snow-covered mountains alive unless he goes with them.

     I thought this film was interesting and many times I wondered if the circumstances of where they were living were really true?  If it’s true, why would anyone ever want to leave?  It is also rumored that people don’t make it out if they try to leave?   The area of Shangra-La reminds me of Tibet.  James Hilton is also the writer of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Random Harvest plus another 17 novels, 7 other novels were made into films.  3 ½* (I liked this movie)  

      

132 min, Adventure directed by Frank Capra with Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, Edward Everett Horton, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Margo, Isabel Jewell, H.B. Warner, Sam Jaffe.  

Note:  Imdb 7.8 out of 10, 92% critic 82% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, Empire Online 4* out of 5*, TCM average user rating 3.69 out of 5.

Special Note:  This film exceeded its original budget by more than $776,000 and it took 5 years to earn back its cost.  The approved budget was $1.25 million and this was the largest amount ever allocated to a project at this time.  It created a serious financial crisis for Columbia Pictures and damaged the partnership between Capra and Studio Head Harry Cohn.  It also strained the friendship between Capra and Robert Riskin, the writer of the screenplay.  Selected in 2016 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.  An eccentric millionaire built an exact copy of the Shangra-La Lamasery in Denver, Colorado and it still exists today.  The first cut ran for 6 hours and then was shortened to 3 ½ hours.  Re-shooting and re-cutting followed after a disastrous preview.  The film was again shortened for television viewing and 25 minutes of footage deleted.  UCLA tried to reconstruct the film but most of the cut footage was degraded and not usable.  Stills were added to fill in the missing scenes to follow the soundtrack.  Jane Wyatt was married to Ronald Reagan (California Governor 1967-1975, US President 1981-1989) between January 26,1940, they had two daughters but one lived only one day.  They adopted a third child a son and they divorced in 1949.  Reagan married Nancy Davis on March 4, 1952.  They had two children, a daughter and a son.  There is another film with the same title from 1973.