When the pressures of the world become too much, we all wish we could escape to a place of peace, and there's no better spot for rest and meditation than Shangri-La, the utopia conjured up by author James Hilton in his best-selling novel "Lost Horizon."
The book has been adapted for the screen twice, first in 1937 by director Frank Capra and again in 1973 by director Ross Hunter. Hunter's version, one of the great fiascoes of its time -- it was renamed "Lost Investment" by Columbia Pictures executives after they got a look at its balance sheet -- has become a campy curio, but Capra's epic still holds up some 60 years after its debut. It's just been reissued on DVD, with plenty of extra features certain to delight, such as a documentary on the painstaking restoration process on the picture and previously unseen sequences featuring stars Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt and Isabel Jewell.
In the mid-1930s, Columbia was a studio still trying to shake off its small-time reputation. "Lost Horizon," which cost a then-staggering $2.5 million and was promoted as "The Mightiest of All Motion Pictures," represented a major risk for the company. Much of the budget was spent on production values: "Horizon" is played out on a series of exquisite sets, many of them obviously influenced by the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Despite deservedly earning an Oscar for Best Art Direction and a nomination for Best Picture, the film did not recoup its cost on its first go-around. By the time it was re-released a few years later, WWII was raging and the pacifist message of "Horizon" was no longer in vogue, which led Columbia to re-edit the 132-minute film. It took film historian Robert Gitt 25 years to reassemble Capra's original vision, in some cases using still photographs and the surviving soundtrack to represent sequences which have not survived.
Although Hilton's story of a crew of refugees discovering a blissful secret society in the hidden Valley of the Blue Moon is still a potent fantasy, what makes "Horizon" truly fascinating today is noting some of the more offbeat aspects of the picture. Although no one in Shangri-La has any use for money or property, Capra takes pains to inject a less-than-subtle anti-Communist message by including a crabby Russian (Margo) who insists on leaving paradise and suffers greatly as a result. The various relationships detailed in the story are also rather provocative. Certainly the combative friendship between Barnard (Thomas Mitchell) and Lovett (Edward Everett Horton) can be read more than one way, especially when Barnard insists on calling his buddy "Lovey" and suggests they play games of "honeymoon bridge" and "double solitaire."
In the book, the heroic Conway (Colman) falls for a Tibetan woman named Lo-Tsen. But since onscreen interracial attraction was still a major taboo in the 1930s, his love interest here is a schoolteacher named Sandra, played by the radiant Wyatt. Although their affair appears to be mostly platonic, there's an attention-grabbing scene in which Conway spies on a skinnydipping Sandra.
"She," adapted from H. Rider Haggard's timeless tale, is another story of perils and passion in a forgotten land. Like "Horizon," it's been produced multiple times, although never as lavishly and entertainingly as the 1935 version (available on both VHS and DVD), starring the imposing Helen Gahagan as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the eternally beautiful ruler of the lost kingdom of Kor. This would be the only film appearance of Gahagan, a noted stage and opera star who later entered the political arena as Helen Gahagan Douglas. Reportedly, Gahagan was embarrassed by the movie and vowed never to heed Hollywood's call again. But perhaps she was her own severest critic: "She" represents Depression Era escapism at its very peak.
The movie was produced by Merian C. Cooper, who'd struck it rich two years earlier with "King Kong." Those with sharp eyes will note that the enormous gate cutting Kor off from the outside world is the same one which served -- for awhile -- to hold Kong in his natural habitat on Skull Island. A box office failure in its day, "She" all but vanished into the RKO vaults for the next 40 years, not even showing up on the Late, Late Show.
What a loss. This outrageously opulent adventure tale stars the stoic Randolph Scott as American explorer John Vincey, who ventures into the Arctic to find the story behind a cryptic 500-year-old letter. Accompanying him are the jolly Holly (Nigel Bruce, later to become a familiar face as Dr. Watson in the Nigel Rathbone "Sherlock Holmes" movies) and the feisty Tanya (Helen Mack), who's secretly attracted to John. After surviving an avalanche and battling cave-dwelling cannibals, the intrepid trio come face to face with a much greater danger, the imperious She, who has been bathing in a flame of eternal life and biding her time for centuries, looking for true love. "I am yesterday and today and tomorrow," She muses, shortly before deciding John is the man worth waiting half a millennium for. Tanya, however, has other ideas.
Thrillingly scored by Max Steiner and featuring backdrops you won't believe (check out the patio of Holly and Tanya's apartment), "She" climaxes with a dazzling ceremony in the Hall of Kings, featuring hundreds of extras performing some of the most bizarre choreography ever filmed. That sequence alone would make the movie worthwhile, but it turns out to be only one of the many treasures of "She." James Sanford
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