LOST HORIZON - DVD review

I have a passion for voices. There are certain actors I could listen to reading anything at hand. Richard Burton, for instance. Joan Plowright. Morgan Freeman. Rex Allen. Basil Rathbone. Lois Chiles. Ralph Richardson. Orson Welles. And the star of "Lost Horizon," Ronald Colman. There is an indefinable quality of voice that sets such people apart and makes their every word worth hearing. Listen to Colman in his great films, here, in "A Tale of Two Cities," in "If I Were King." Magnificent. It is perhaps why director Frank Capra was willing to wait almost three years to get Colman to play the lead in his classic 1937 film version of James Hilton's celebrated novel of Shangri-La. It was worth the wait.

Hilton was inspired to write "Lost Horizon" in 1933 after hearing about the real-life exploits of adventurer George Leigh-Mallory, who was lost in a blizzard on Mt. Everest; but there is more than a little of E.M. Forster's allegorical short story "The Other Side of the Hedge" in it, too. The characters even refer several times to "the other side of the hill."

In any case, the plot is about a small group of people lead by Colman who escape from a Chinese uprising only to find themselves kidnapped and brought by plane to the high Himalayas. There, they are led into the fabulous land of Shangri-La, the "Valley of the Blue Moon," a wondrous Garden of Eden isolated in the mountains of Tibet. Except for Conway, the others are initially suspicious of the beauty and perfection of the new place. But it begins to grow on them, everyone but George, Conway's brother. After all, Shangri-La offers perfect health and almost everlasting life, with no crime and no disputes. Good manners prevail and the only rule is kindness.

The cast includes some well-known names besides Colman. Thomas Mitchell is along for the ride as an American swindler in hiding. Edward Everett Horton plays a befuddled British geologist. John Howard is the discontented brother. Isabel Jewell is a dying woman in the party, Gloria. Margo plays Maria, a young lady they find in the valley, whose final scene is one most audiences remember most; Sam Jaffe plays the High Lama; H.B. Warner is the soft-voiced Mr. Chang; and, most important, Jane Wyatt plays the beautiful woman Conway comes to love. It's an enchanting group.

The sets for Shangri-La were among the biggest ever built for a Hollywood movie, the architecture inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Warner), Sound, Music, Assistant Director, Art Direction, and Film Editing, winning in the latter two categories.

Video:
By the late sixties, all of the original negatives for "Lost Horizon" had deteriorated. The present copy is a meticulous restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, under the director of Robert Gitt. It was restored from the best prints and copies available, but because of the lack of original negatives from which to work, the reconstruction lacks much of the luster the film once possessed. There is some minor grain, but there are no identifiable age marks, whatsoever, thanks to Sony's digital remastering.

Audio:
Interestingly, the film's complete original soundtrack was preserved, although there is a total of about seven minutes of missing footage that should have gone along with it. The absent scenes have been replaced by still shots, a minor distraction at worst. The monaural sound is no great shakes but very quiet and easily listenable.

Extras:
Special features abound on the disc, appropriate to the film's place of honor in film history. Production notes are provided; alternative endings (the first ending didn't last more than a week or so before being yanked); restoration comparisons; deleted scenes (taken from original negatives and showing just how good the original image quality really was); a photo documentary narrated by film historian Kendall Miller; and restoration commentary by film critic Charles Champlin and restorer Robert Gitt. Subtitles are in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai (sorry, no Tibetan). Twenty-eight scene selections and a trailer round out the offerings.

Parting Thoughts:
I suppose today "Lost Horizon" could be seen by first-time viewers as hopelessly old fashioned, but given a chance it holds up remarkably well. Capra's direction is lively, the acting is uniformly convincing, and the photography is gorgeous by the standards of any day. Besides, if you could find just for a moment the peace of Utopia, wouldn't you go for it, in our own age more than ever?