IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029162/
IMDB rating: 7,9
Director: Frank Capra
Main Cast: Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, Edward Everett Horton, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Margo
"It took British author James Hilton six weeks to write his visionary novel Lost horizon. It took director Frank Capra two years-and half of his home studio Columbia's annual budget-to bring it to the screen.
The movie belongs to a genre that reached its heyday in the 1930s: the philosophical drama. Usually based on plays, films such as Street scene, Death takes a holiday, On borrowed time and The petrified forest dealt with driving issues of the day and embraced weighty questions of life and death. Adapted from the novel by Hilton, Lost horizon proved more popular and enduring than any of them, principally because the filmmaker pulled out all the stops in translating the material to the screen. It was the grandest production ever attempted by Columbia Pictures, a studio which, for all of its renown and respect, was little more than a Poverty Row outfit when financing was concerned. Aided by Dimitri Tiomkin's outsized score, Capra created an utterly convincing screen portrayal of Shangri-La, and his audience's suspension of disbelief was such that no one even thought to ask how the inhabitants of Shangri-La could have gotten their grand piano over those mountain passes. The most compelling element of the film, however - proof of Capra's keen sense of public mood - was its message. At the time of the movie's release, it was clear that the First World War, still very much in peoples' minds, had been fought in vain; the world was preparing to tear itself apart anew. Lost horizon offered a notion of hope, based in fantasy, that it was essential for good men to keep themselves at the ready, to lead when the carnage ceased. In a sense, the movie was a not-so-distant cousin to a British production of the same era, Things to come, which presented a similar idea in science-fiction terms. Capra's choices in casting were uncanny, particularly Ronald Colman as disillusioned diplomat Robert Conway and John Howard as his brother - Howard had taken over the role of Bulldog Drummond from Colman in a series of films from the same period, and they looked enough alike that they might've been brothers.
When Lost horizon was shown to preview audiences, it ran nearly three hours and it was a disaster. In his autobiography, Capra claims to have rescued his pet project by merely burning the first two reels and opening the film with the evacuation scene; In fact, while Capra did remove the film's 'flashback' framework, he made most of his cuts in the body of the picture. The release length of Lost horizon was 132 minutes, pared down to 119 when it went into general distribution. When it was reissued in the 1940s and 1950s, it was rather clumsily pared down to anywhere from 95 to 100 minutes. Only in the mid-1980s was Lost horizon restored to its original length, with stills used to illustrate certain scenes for which only the soundtrack existed. While not the enormous hit Capra and Columbia had hoped it would be, Lost horizon was popular enough to allow the name 'Shangri-La' enter the household-word category." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/lost-horizon-v30150
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