{"id":6782,"date":"2013-07-01T02:47:02","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T06:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=6782"},"modified":"2013-07-01T02:47:02","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T06:47:02","slug":"br-lost-horizon-1973","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=6782","title":{"rendered":"BR: Lost Horizon (1973)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to: <\/strong>Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> \/ <\/em>J to L<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Film: Weak\/ BR Transfer: Excellent\/ BR Extras: Excellent<\/p>\n

Label: Twilight Time\/ All \/\u00a0Released: December 11, 2012<\/p>\n

Genre: Musical \/ Fantasy \/ Adventure \/ Romance<\/p>\n

Synopsis: A British diplomat and fellow travellers are taken to a mysterious valley in the Himalayas where no one grows old, but its Asian people do much singing and dancing in non-native yet utterly fluent English.<\/p>\n

Special Features: \u00a0Isolated stereo instrumental music track \/ 1973 making-of featurette: “Ross Hunter: On the Way to Shangri-La” \/ Alternate Music Scene: “I Come to You” \/ Burt Bacharach Song Demos (mono) \/ Theatrical Trailer + Teaser Trailer \/ 2 TV Spots \/ 8-page colour booklet with liner notes by film histoian Julie Kirgo \/ Limited to 3000 copies \/ Available exclusively from Screen Archives Entertainment<\/a><\/p>\n

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Review:<\/p>\n

Hollywood producer Ross Hunter had built a solid career making glossy, star-studded productions during the sixties (Pillow Talk<\/strong>, Flower Drum Song<\/strong>, Airport<\/strong>), as well as remakes of classics like Imitation of Life<\/strong> (1959) and Madame X<\/strong> (1966), so there was nothing unusual in selecting Lost Horizon<\/strong> (1937), that classic tale of the hidden valley of Shangri-La, for a widescreen update with an international cast singing the music of hit-masters Burt Bacharach & Hal David, and dancing to the nuanced movements of Fred Astaire\u2019s co-choreographer Hermes Pan .<\/p>\n

What ultimately emerged on cinema screens (well, fleetingly) was a grand train wreck that ensured the \u201973 version would almost disappear from circulation, never appearing on VHS, yet popping up on a Pioneer laserdisc edition in 1992, and quietly as a Sony MOD DVD-R in 2011 with significant extras.<\/p>\n

The big question isn\u2019t why remake a classic \u2013 Frank Capra\u2019s 1937 film<\/a> [M<\/a>] has its own share of flaws, and enhancing Hilton\u2019s free-love tale for the hippy generation seems like a plausible gamble for any Hollywood producer during the late sixties \/ early seventies \u2013 but whether time has mellowed the flaws within Hunter\u2019s production, and proved critics wrong (especially the Medved brothers, who in 1980 nominated the film for a Golden Turkey Award as the Worst Musical Extravaganza in Hollywood History).<\/p>\n

Although screenwriter Larry Kramer (Women in Love<\/strong>) is credited with adapting the script from James Hilton\u2019s novel, there are whole chunks of dialogue clearly lifted from the \u201937 film, including the ludicrous philosophical declaration (presumably from the novel) where Kindness is Better than Struggle. Kindness is great, and the people of Shangri-La \u2013 high and low thinkers alike \u2013 may understand English and French from their peculiar lessons begun after kindergarten, but their Kind Lives must have inbred \/ perpetuated mental indolence, because it took an outsider like engineer Sam Cornelius (George Kennedy) to craft an irrigation system so women need not carry buckets of water up steep hills to their terraced crops.<\/p>\n

Quite surprisingly, director Charles Jarrott sometimes mimics whole montages from Capra\u2019s film \u2013 namely the opening sequence where diplomatic Richard Conway (Peter Finch) flees in a DC3 with fellow while folks in the Chinese province of Baskul explodes in civil war \u2013 and with rare exceptions, the musical numbers have a perfunctory directorial style that doesn\u2019t exploit the rich 2.40:1 ratio in Panavision.<\/p>\n

What screenwriter Kramer did right was expand on characters given short-shrift in Capra\u2019s film (the \u201937 version underwent a significant post-production and brutal re-cuts, losing valuable scenes of character development over the years), but some necessary scenes involving more philosophical discussion were reduced and reconfigured for musical numbers \u2013 with grievous results.<\/p>\n

Bacharach\u2019s scores during his brief period as a film composer tended to hover within a kind of Bavarian jazz lounge style, which gave most of his output a sameness of sounds; Casino Royal<\/a><\/strong> is elegantly orchestrated, but its oompa-pa bawdy style isn\u2019t dissimilar to his comedies (After the Fox<\/strong>, What\u2019s Up Pussycat?<\/strong>) and western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid<\/strong>) \u2013 only the hit themes (with lyrics by Hal David) really held their own as pop-jazz classics. To Hunter, it seemed logical to engage the composer and lyricist of the free love hippy ode \u201cWhat the World Needs Now is Love \u201c from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice<\/strong> (1969) to write a full score for this supposedly lavish 2.5 hour epic.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, while the melodies are catchy and the score\u2019s orchestrations are a clean balance between orchestra and light pop, the lyrics are astonishingly moronic, reducing most of the musical numbers into the staggered impact points that made the \u201973 version such a train wreck.<\/p>\n

A fertility song \u2013 \u201cLiving Together, Growing Together\u201d \u2013 is an insipid parade of smiley faced extras bisected for a moment by a strange ribbon spinning sequence that\u2019s oddly reminiscent of Pan\u2019s choreography for eponymous character\u2019s entry into Rome in Cleopatra <\/strong>(1963); and there\u2019s a central \u2018dance\u2019 featuring two elevated parents performing a dangerous hand-off with their infant child like some holy football.<\/p>\n

Olivia Hussey\u2019s song & dance intro (\u201cShare the Joy\u201d) is tepid and seems almost impossible to believe it was choreographed by Pan, yet his low-point is the little hip-jiggle and stone tossing that make up the introspective song Sally Kellerman uses to convince George Kennedy (fresh from Hunter\u2019s Airport<\/strong>) to give up his quest for stealing Shangri-La\u2019s gold and just chill out and go with the flow like herself and the rest of the Shangri-La-ers.<\/p>\n

Leads Finch and Liv Ullmann have some genuine screen charisma as a couple, but Finch\u2019s acceptable hybrid of playing Conway with a little Ronald Colman (who starred in the Capra film) and Gary Cooper is neutered once he attempts to sing; and Ullmann \u2013 whose character of the local teacher was heavily distilled into a vacuous blue-eyed doll \u2013 is unfortunately given one of the film\u2019s most moronic musical numbers, prancing around with school kids in the arm-waving Bavarian circus romp \u201cThe World is a Circle\u201d \u2013 perhaps the film\u2019s second-worst song after \u201cLiving Together, Growing Together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple\u2019s most embarrassing moment occurs in the romantic clincher \u201cI Might Frighten Her Away,\u201d where a wide-eyed, grinning Ullmann appears on the Lamasary\u2019s steps like a possessed Reagan from The Exorcist<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (the resemblance of her expression to the possessed child is truly uncanny), and Finch attempts to lip-sync his words with stilted stage bravado (and kind of evokes a singing Richard Burton, as both actors share stiff jaws and shoulders when projecting Great Words of Emotional Impact beyond the camera lens).<\/p>\n

Non-singers Ullmann, Finch, and Hussey were dubbed, so their lip-syncing to songs is rather wobbly, whereas Bobby Van (who held his own in Kiss Me Kate<\/a><\/strong>) comes off as the most professional in spite of having to croon the idiotic \u201cQuestion Me An Answer,\u201d with its faux Asian harmonics. Prolific TV character actor James Shigeta (who co-starred in Hunter\u2019s Flower Drum Song<\/strong> in 1971) also gets to use his pipes, but his big number is the ridiculous \u201cLiving Together, Growing Together\u201d \/ baby football celebration.<\/p>\n

Neither John Gielgud nor Kennedy sing in the existing cut, but Kellerman\u2019s two efforts are as nuanced as her odd physical performance style. Charles Boyer (who also doesn\u2019t sing) plays the High Lama Father Perrault and is surprisingly good, and although his dialogue is similar to Sam Jaffe\u2019s in the \u201937 film, Boyer gives it more gravitas, making his two scenes with Finch among the film\u2019s highpoints.<\/p>\n

Like Kennedy, York also doesn\u2019t croon a single tune, but unlike his \u201937 counterpart, he\u2019s been given more scenes with love interest Hussey (a great coup of stunt casting, reuniting the actors after their fiery romance in 1968\u2019s Romeo and Juliet<\/strong>)which fixes an existing flaw within the original film: the severely truncated relationship between Conway\u2019s younger, impetuous brother George, and the supposedly 20 year old woman who spins lies and convinces the brothers to leave the Lamasary with tragic results. It\u2019s perhaps Kramer\u2019s most important script augmentation, although one suspects that because the \u201973 version contains scenes present only in part in the reconstruction of Capra\u2019s 132 min. cut, Kramer may extracted material from either the longer shooting script, or bothered to consult with Hilton\u2019s novel and fix potential continuity holes.<\/p>\n

With few exceptions, the \u201973 film follows the same scenes and order as the \u201937 version (including Conway\u2019s preposterously successful journey back to the Lamasary in the finale), but Kramer bothered to give almost equal time to the secondary characters, which in the reconstructed Capra version isn\u2019t as balanced; the primary focus in the \u201937 film remains the romance between Conway and Catherine, and some important philosophical exchanges between Conway and Chang which were further distilled in Hunter\u2019s Panavision remake.<\/p>\n

Jarrott\u2019s visual approach is to keep things wide and simple, so there are few kinetic sequences beyond the opening flight from rebels, but Bruce Surtees\u2019 lovely compositions are on occasion a little overlit, and lack the more natural and occasionally dramatic lighting style of the \u201937 version. Jarrott had evolved from actor to TV director in Britain, and while his historical diptych Anne of a Thousand Days<\/strong> (1969) and Mary Queen of Scots<\/strong> (1971) made him a viable film director, his theatrical output was rather banal, which perhaps made him suitable again as a generic TV director in the U.S. (Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story<\/strong>, A Promise Kept: The Oksana Baiul Story<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

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The Home Video Release<\/strong><\/p>\n

The running times and specifics of what material \u2013 songs and dramatic scenes \u2013 that were cut from the theatrical version remain hazy. Reportedly running 150 mins., the film was reduced to 143 mins., while other sources state 3 musical numbers and short extensions were cut, boosting the cut footage count to 23 mins.<\/p>\n

The deleted musical numbers were restored for Pioneer\u2019s 1992 laserdisc, which also included an isolated mono music track. This roughly 148 \/ 149 min. version seems to be the source for Sony\u2019s 2011 DVD-R, itself likely the result of Sony at one time planning their own Blu-ray edition before stepping back and becoming a licensing corporation.<\/p>\n

Twilight Time\u2019s Blu-ray contains a gorgeous HD master with discrete 5.1 sound that\u2019s very robust. The details in Sony\u2019s transfer are superb \u2013 in one shot, the pattern of a cheese cloth draped over the lens to diffuse midday light is visible – and the colours of Jean Louis\u2019 pastel-hued costumes really glow. This is an exceptional transfer, and fans of the musical will be delighted it finally looks and sounds proper. (When originally released, the film was also shown in 6-track 70mm blow-up prints.)<\/p>\n

Extras (all in HD) ported over from Sony\u2019s MOD disc include a full screen 1973 making-of featurette (\u201cRoss Hunter: On the Way to Shangri-La\u201d) and a gallery of theatrical and TV trailers which collectively demonstrate how Hunter was trying to brand himself as a bringer of quality productions with international, family-friendly appeal. The trailers are a little clunky \u2013 each is trying to sell a combo of Ross Hunter Magic + romance + action + song \u2013 whereas the featurette has plenty of behind-the-scenes footage showing the sets (including the refitted Camelot<\/strong> castle set from 1967, which is frankly no less authentic that the Art Deco creation in the \u201937 version), and costumes, plus a glimpse of the still-deleted reprise of \u201cLiving Together, Growing Together\u201d sung by extras, Kellerman, and Kennedy after building a water conveyance system.<\/p>\n

Both DVD and BR include an alternate cut of Finch and Ullmann\u2019s \u201cI Come to You\u201d scene atop an expansive valley, and a lengthy montage of Burt Bacharach performing demo versions of the songs against an animated filmstrip backdrop with vintage production stills.<\/p>\n

Exclusive to TT\u2019s BR is a crisp isolated music track that features the instrumental score and songs (minus vocal tracks), and Julie Kirgo cites the film\u2019s pros and cons in her liner notes which seek a redress of the film\u2019s legendary status as a mega-bomb.<\/p>\n

Just as Hilton\u2019s novel and the resulting \u201937 film were populist statements against wars that were throughout the globe during the late thirties, Hunter\u2019s film is also a time capsule of an attempt to offer a message of hope through its featured (and very white bread) characters: a diplomat (Finch), tired of stomping out racial, political, and egotistical strife between various cultures and countries; a burnt-out, drug addicted Vietnam war photographer (Kellerman) finding meaning in a tranquil world steeped in kindness to one and all; and an engineer \/ former embezzler (Kennedy) who regains self-worth and repents for past sins by bringing modern conveniences to improve the lives of the valley\u2019s \u2018little people.\u2019<\/p>\n

Hunter\u2019s film is still a mess of a wreck \u2013 amid the producer\u2019s good creative intentions are the slow-motion collisions which hypnotized bad movie aficionados, and the Bacharach \/ David tunes are evil corkscrew songs whose facile lyrics refuse to vacate one\u2019s consciousness for days<\/em> (\u201cLiving Together, Growing Together\u201d has the same tempo <\/em>as a fast walk down the sidewalk) \u2013 but Sony and TT deserve credit for not just releasing the most complete version possible (the soundtrack LP contain a paltry 35 mins. of score & songs), but giving it the special edition treatment on DVD-R and BR respectively.<\/p>\n

Fromage or a maligned classic, Lost Horizon <\/strong>deserves a little<\/em> respect after being absent from circulation for decades, and given the film\u2019s scoring pedigree, it\u2019s taken far too long for Bacharach and David\u2019s rare poke at an original musical film to be seen and enjoyed by fans in its original form. For some candid recollections by a former usher during the film\u2019s first week (and its recutting soon after), read the final third (and reader comments) of DVD Savant\u2019s review<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Hilton\u2019s novel was previously adapted as Shangri-la<\/a><\/strong>, a stage musical in 1956, and later filmed as a Hallmark TV special in 1960 with new songs for the feature-length show that\u2019s vanished into oblivion. Perhaps Ross Hunter\u2019s version may be a masterpiece in comparison.<\/p>\n

International film and TV adaptations of James Hilton\u2019s works include Lost Horizon<\/strong> in 1937 [M], 1960, 1973; Knight Without Armor<\/strong> (1937); Good bye Mr. Chips<\/a><\/strong> in 1937, 1959, 1969, 1984, and<\/em> 2002; We Are Not Alone <\/strong>(1939); Rage in Heaven<\/strong> (1940); Random Harvest<\/a><\/strong> in 1942 and 1961; and So Well Remembered <\/strong>(1947).<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 2013 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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External References<\/em>:<\/p>\n

IMDB <\/a>— Soundtrack Album<\/a> — Composer Filmography<\/a><\/p>\n

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Vendor Search Links:<\/em><\/p>\n

Amazon.ca<\/a>\"\" \"\" —<\/span> Amazon.com<\/a>\"\" \"\" —<\/span> Amazon.co.uk<\/a>\"\" \"\"—New movie releases on iTunes<\/a>\"\"
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Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> <\/em>\/\u00a0J to L<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to: Home \/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews \/ J to L . Film: Weak\/ BR Transfer: Excellent\/ BR Extras: Excellent Label: Twilight Time\/ All \/\u00a0Released: December 11, 2012 Genre: Musical \/ Fantasy \/ Adventure \/ Romance Synopsis: A British diplomat and fellow travellers are taken to a mysterious valley in the Himalayas where no one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[1340,2096,2099,2098,2094,2093,2097],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1Lo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6782"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6795,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782\/revisions\/6795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}