Lost Horizon, 1937 (Grade B+)

Director: Frank Capra

Awards?  Yes -- some academy awards and lost of nominations; plus is on an AFI Top 100 list

Cast:: Ronald Coleman; Jane Wyatt; John Howard; Margo; Thomas Mitchell; Edward Everett Horton; Isabel Jewe;;; H.B. Warner; Sam Jaffe

A Standard Plot Description Says: "In Frank Capra's classic based on the James Hilton novel, plane-crash survivors are led through the Himalayas to Shangri-La, a village without hate or crime and where no one ages. Robert Conway (Ronald Coleman) is chosen to succeed Shangri-La's High Lama and falls for Sondra (Jane Wyatt), but his brother convinces him to leave on an ill-fated trek. When Conway ends up in England with amnesia, will he manage to go back and fulfill his destiny?"

sez says:--I say this movie as a child on TV and never forgot it--it has a magical sense about it that is a perfect fit for films of the 1930s. I say it again in the 1970's--at which time I realized that this "utopia" is based on slave labor (happy dark skin people who don't have plumbing yet while the white folks live in a castle.) And the the way you keep men from fighting with each other over women is that if a man want's another man's wife, all he has to do is ask for her, and the original husband will give her to the man who has asked (nobody has to ask her!) --so, the women in the castle, while they are not quite slaves, they are the property of men to be handed around at the whim of those men.  So this is a utopia for whom? 

Now I watched it again--and the latest version to be released is a remake of the original. It is really fascinating. Evidently a lot of different, cut versions have been released over time. Film scholars undertook the job of putting the original back together.  They could not find film footage for the entire move--but they had the full audio  SO they have inserted stills into the film to look at  when there is audio that lacks the original visual footage. The story is broadened..and the philosophy of what might have been considered utopia is also opened up. The problems I had with the story in when I saw it in the 1970s are all still there--and they are even magnified.  But the bases of this society would make a wonderful topic of study about what do people imagine they want, and how they perceive the world as it actually exists.

Plus, no matter how much I chafe at the racism and sexism and classism of the story it is still a wonderfully compelling film, well made and  not to be missed. Thre is good reason it is considered a classic.  (Grade B+)