Simply Unbelievable

Lost Horizon, a rather uneven 1937 Frank Capra film about a utopia hidden among Tibetan mountains, begins with a simple question, spelled out in the film’s opening image of a book with calligraphy writing:

In these days of wars and rumors of wars – haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight?

The simple answer, of course, is “yes.” We have all, at one time or another, dreamed there is place within this world where we would worry less, struggle more moderately and enjoy ourselves a great deal more. Indeed, most of the major faiths in the world hold out the hope that our corporal existence, caught up as it is in growth decay, is but a stepping stone to an eternal life, in which much of what make human existence unsatisfying will be absent.

As a film, Lost Horizon (based on the James Hilton novel of the same name) is well aware of these shared beliefs, and it unintentionally functions as a kind of ideological litmus test. Either you believe – or want to believe – it is possible for a rural village isolated from the rest of humanity to function in perfect harmony or you think the entire premise is the farfetched plot device of a dreamer pounding out his foolish philosophy on a keyboard.

As for myself, I fall heavily in the latter category of viewer, and not entirely because I want to. Having read Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Thomas More’s Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s The Island (to name just a few), I was fully prepared to accept the idea that a fictional community, isolated from what we understand as the rest of the world, could theoretically develop in ways quite different from actual societies, and that the theoretical differences of the fictional community, no matter how idealistic or impractical, could help illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of a genuine society’s political arrangements. This is, after all, precisely what the aforementioned authors were trying to do.

More's Utopian dream

Unfortunately, Lost Horizon fails to match the literary explorations of social organization mentioned above precisely because it fails to present a political philosophy to account for its fictional utopia. What we have instead is what Pauline Kael called “high-flown cracker-barrel sentimentality,” in which the Tibetan village of Shangri-La is flush with affluence, health, happiness and peace for no other reason than one of the lead characters says so, and everybody around him behaves accordingly.

However, this is not to say the film is entirely without merit.

Capra’s overall direction is practiced and professional, and the cinematography and the sets are something to behold, even if Grahame Greene was right to quip that Shangri-La looked a lot like a Hollywood estate. Ronald Colman’s portrayal of British Diplomat Robert Conway and Jane Wyatt's turn as Sondra are both excellent performances, rendered even more so by the relatively amateurish efforts of their ill-used supporting cast (who at times disappear from the film's plot entirely).

The action proper begins with a chaotic scene at a Chinese outpost where Conway is helping to evacuate British subjects from the onrush of an unnamed war. After escaping with his brother on the last plane with a motley trio of passangers, there is a series of taut scenes in which the passengers gradually realize they are flying in the wrong direction. Bad goes to worse when the plane goes down in the middle of a mountain range whose cold and remoteness promise certain death. When the passengers are rescued and taken to Shangri-La, a peaceful valley shielded from the weather and the world by the size of the peaks surrounding it, the mystery concerning the film's whirlwind opening only deepens.

Looking for answers about Shangri-La

At this point, the table seems set for a rather delightful adventure story, full of mystery and suspense. Instead, in comes the ideology and out goes just about everything else. The set of characters on the plane and their complex interactions are dropped the moment they enter Shangri-La and the focus shifts to Conway and his internal struggle between his desire to remain in Tibet and serve what he believes is a higher purpose and his duty to his country in a time of impending war. The other characters, for the most part, are left to their own devices, appearing only sporadically and when the plot demands it. So unimportant do they become, they are left entirely out of the film's bizarre climax.

We never really learn what Shangri-La is, beyond the basic facts that it was created by a lost European missionary (Father Perrault) in the 18th century, and there is no war, seemingly no vice and no lack to make people unhappy. People in the valley also tend to live longer, hundreds of years longer. As a high official named Chang explains, the key to all this success has to do "with our general belief ... in moderation." (and here I was thinking it might have been Krispy Kreme donuts).

This is about as complicated as Chang gets, beyond an explanation that in Shangri-La people are encouraged to “be kind,” and since no one wants for anything, they abide by this advice and get along well with one another. The middle of the film is chock full of interminable scenes to detail how happy everyone is and how happy their happiness makes most of our stranded travelers – the plot demands, of course, that somebody is unhappy, and in this case, it is Conway’s brother, George.

Conway and his unhappy brother

Bereft of any other data, we almost accept the circumstances on screen at face-value. I say almost because they are several flies in the ointment. The first comes when an incredulous Conway asks what a married man would do if another man was interested in sleeping with his wife. Without missing a beat, Chang replies that if the other man wanted the woman that badly, then the husband should be kind enough to offer his wife to the lustful suitor. Although Conway is initially stunned by this response, he ultimately accepts it at face value, and the filmmakers expect the same from the audience.

There are plenty of reasons the explanation is patently absurd, not the least of which is the fact that Hilton – or Robert Riskin, the screenwriter – seem to never have read Homer – or any of the other Greek classics, in which the emotional primacy of sexual possession, and the jealousy and rage it can provoke, is the meat of many a great drama. In addition to our civilization’s collective literary memory, we all have minds and organs and can well understand how the two often work at cross purposes and wreak havoc on us.

The film’s internal shortcomings are even further exposed during its climax, when Conway is convinced by his brother and his brother’s love interest that the High Lama was a madman and Shangri-La nothing more than an opulent prison. Conway, who has just been named as the replacement for said High Lama and has been extremely clever throughout the film, decides to take the pair at their word and depart with them for the arduous journey back to civilization. The notion of using his newfound power to figure out what’s what or confronting Chang or Sondra inexplicably seems to never to occur to him.

Wyatt's performance is a highlight

The climax is further tainted by this conundrum: If Shangri-La is truly a utopia, then why was Maria – the longtime Shangri-La resident involved with Conway’s brother – so desperate to leave? Having apparently lived there for hundreds of years, she must have known she would die – or, at the very least, age considerably and become unattractive to Conway’s brother – if she left the valley? And yet, she chooses to leave anyway. At the very least, this proves she was unhappy, something supposedly impossible in Shangri-La, right? No further motive for her subterfuge about Shangri-La or her decision to flee is ever provided.

 

In sum, a film about ideas – especially a film that all but jettisons plot and characterization after an hour – has to have ideas rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny or the effort fails. Lost Horizon is bold on sentiment – even if the entire Shangri-La enterprise seems somewhat excessive if the only real goal is to save cultural artifacts from "coming wars" – and it relishes exploring its central character's dilemma, but neither is enough to save it from its overt absurdities and our inability as audience members to continue to suspend disbelief. 

A miniature paradise...

If it works for anything, it works as a fine example of what an expensive picture looked like in the late 1930s. Lost Horizon's budget was in excess of $2 million – an absurd figure for that day and age.  When it was released, it was a poorly reviewed, box office failure that nearly bankrupted the studio. Capra himself is rumored to have been incredibly unhappy with the final product. Since then, it has achieved a kind of cult status as an exemplar of being ahead of its times (in terms of scale and setting) and foreshadowing many of the big blockbuster adventure films that followed in its wake. Both claims are undoubtedly true, but Capra undoubtedly made better pictures, and no amount of skill and production can overcome the simplicity of this source material.  

Nobody Falls in Love Anymore…

Or at least, not on screen they do.

We live in the age of insufferable romantic comedies, wherein aesthetically pleasing actors and actresses engage in childish antics as they annoy their way toward some kind of emotional and physical connection. Is it love these contemporary celluloid couples finally arrive at after their gaudy comedy of errors careens to a distinctly unremarkable conclusion? Somehow, I doubt it.

This is not to say we expect to go to romantic comedies today and see something completely original.

The cagey among us know there have been too many films, too many plotlines and pickup lines exhausted for that. Indeed, I am not even certain we want originality from this genre. Rather, like the true and tested lover in our lives (or the one we yearn to find), I believe we want our romantic comedies to skillfully repackage everything we know from past experiences in a way that continues to tickle the better bones in our body. But we also want to watch two people actually fall in love. I mean, that is the point, right?

Unfortunately, nobody falls in love in the movies anymore. That something like a hangover or a rot has eroded the genre’s former standards is fairly obvious, if you look for it. The people we watch in movies nowadays meet and hookup. For how long? Who can say? To find two people who appear to be falling in love on film one has to go back to classics like 1934’s It Happened One Night. It is not an easy journey, because there are so many clichés one must get on the other side of, but it is a trip well worth taking.

To be sure, there is something overtly artificial in Frank Capra’s classic about a rich girl who runs away from an unhappy marriage and finds true love in the form of coarse and underclass reporter, but the fantasy behind this setup is much more palatable than the ridiculousness that all too often accompanies the Cinderella-story knockoffs we are forced to endure in today’s theaters. Capra was a skilled craftsman of the highest order, one who knew how to portray human sentiment without sliding down the slope and landing in the land of sentimentality.

In the hands of less talented actors, the relationship between the leads might have devolved into farce, too. But It Happened One Night boasts Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, both of whom took home little gold statues for performances more than worthy of the accolade. Gable, in particular, is impressive in the way he mixes grandeur and desperation to craft a wholly believable ruffian who stereotypically harbors a hidden idealism built on pride and good will towards his fellow man. That we accept him and accept the almost insane premise that throws the two into each other’s lives is entirely down to the undeniable authenticity of  the pair's interactions. And they are helped in this task by a script that is alive with wit.

You see, people fall in love – real love, not lust or infatuation – by talking to one another. There must be a certain level of shared understanding, a certain level of what I will call deftness and presentation – and, of course, infectious flirtation.  Without a delicate and case-specific combination of all of these, the spark between two people never truly turns to fire. And before you think I have forgotten about the film under review here, let me hasten to point out that It Happened One Night captures exactly what men and women say to another when they are engaged in the benign combat that begins love.

I will make no predictable claims about films being “better” back then. I will only say that writers had to work, in that they had to rhetorically walk around much of the crudeness that pervades – some would say perverts – the romantic comedy genre today. As Sam Wasson said, “wit was the best (and only) way to talk about sex” back then and so we are privy to remarkable conversations that dance around obvious attractions and even better metaphors concerning attraction’s end result.

 

Consider how Gable drapes blankets over a string to separate the couple at night. He blithely calls this the Walls of Jericho. Later, of course, these walls come down. An even more famous scene has Colbert showing a leg to stop a car. The act is hardly noteworthy today, but back then it was both scandalous and sweet, and in terms of the film’s plot, it helps convince Gable that the girl he is falling for really does have some spirit in her. My mind boggles at trying to imagine what a contemporary director would have to come up with to achieve the same effect.

The romantic comedy is dead – or beeping away faintly on life support – these days precisely because the whimsical subtlety and misdirection that makes flirting with a potential significant other so much fun is largely absent. There is goofy hilarity to be sure, but the actors today are not talking to each other the way Gable and Colbert did. And because of that lack of precision in the scripts, the contemporary equivalent of catching a glimpse of that special someone’s leg no longer matters all that much...