Lost Horizon
Short description
Lost Horizon follows a group of Westerners whose flight out of a revolutionary China ends in a crash in the Himalayas. Rescued by strangers and led through the mountains, they reach Shangri-La, a fertile, sheltered valley where life is peaceful and people seem not to age. The diplomat Robert Conway, the film's central figure, finds the place increasingly appealing, even as the outside world moves toward war. The valley's leaders have their own interest in him, and the arrival of the visitors raises the question of whether they will stay or try to leave.
Frank Capra directed and produced the film, from a screenplay by Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman. It followed It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in Capra's filmography and came before You Can't Take It with You. Ronald Colman plays Conway, with Jane Wyatt, Edward Everett Horton, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell and Margo among the credited cast of 26. Columbia Pictures backed the production on a budget of 4 million dollars, a large sum for its time.
On IMDb the film holds a critics' rating of 7.7 out of 10 from 14 reviews, while on TMDB it has a rating of 6.9 out of 10 from 253 votes. The gap suggests critics have rated it more warmly than the broader audience has.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film exceeded its budget by more than $776,000 and did not recoup its investment for over 5 years. The resulting financial problems at Columbia Pictures disrupted Capra’s collaboration with studio head Harry Cohn and screenwriter Robert Riskin, with whom Capra had worked on many of his films.
- The film is based on the novel of the same name (1933) by James Hilton.
- In 1942, the film was re-released as “The Lost Horizon of Shangri-La”. Robert Conway’s long, drunken speech, in which he criticized diplomatic games and war, was removed because studio executives feared that such sentiments, expressed during the height of World War II, would be unpopular with audiences. Capra felt the film made no sense without the scene and characterized the 12 minutes cut as “vital”.
- In 1952, a 92-minute version of the film was released, aiming to downplay the pro-communist sympathies discernible in the original and limit empathy towards China, with whom the American government's relations were becoming strained. The film was later lost, and in 1973, the American Film Institute began its restoration. The project was undertaken by UCLA Film & Television Archive in collaboration with Columbia Pictures and took 13 years. It was possible to restore all 132 minutes of the original soundtrack and 125 minutes of video. The missing seven minutes of video were replaced with a combination of photographs of the actors and scenes from the filming.
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