Lost Horizon is a film about paradise and the temperament it takes to chose paradise over, let’s say, reality. In it, a small group of British nationals (and one American) are hijacked as they are fleeing war-torn China and taken to the mountains of Tibet, where they are lead to the mythical valley that is Shangri-La. It is a paradise indeed, a sunny, idyllic, self-sustaining farming community and palace miraculously sheltered from the wind and snows that plague the rest of the Himalayas. The group is varied, the British diplomat Robert Conway (the ever dashing Ronald Colman), his manic and insecure brother George, a hardened American blonde, a twitchy paleontologist (played by Edward Everett Horton, recognized mainly by me as Fred Astaire’s best friend in The Gay Divorcee and perhaps by more people as the narrator of Fractured Fairytales on the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”) and a man on the run from the law, who had once been a plumber. Initially, they’re looking for various things; Conway’s in line for a cabinet post, but it’s his brother who seems to have all the ambition; the paleontologist is hoping a discovery will bring him fame and recognition; the woman is looking for her own death; the plumber is out for his own advantage and keeping out of jail. But their lives are upset, and they find themselves prisoners in paradise, and then they have to accept or reject a world that seems to good to be true, and too fantastic to be believed. Most of the hostages come to accept their fate, even relish the life the valley promises them, but Conway’s brother cannot.

I don’t really know what to say about this movie. It is perplexing on several fronts; the first is a paradise built, it seems to me, without considering that women could be equals to men (and this is sort of excusable, because it was the thirties, but it makes a paradise seem to the modern palate, well, somewhat less of a paradise); the second is that Shangri-La is really a bomb-proof collection of things of value, beauty, and knowledge hidden in a place where they’ll be safe from war and greed, and still inaccessible to the bulk of humanity; the third is that it was a valley of Tibetans who had the fountain of youth (so to speak, since there was nothing so simple as a fountain, of course) but ruled by the invading white men and missionaries, and for an out of the way location in Asia, it has enough white women to tempt the Conway brothers. Which makes it convenient from the perspective of our British travelers who get stuck there, but… again, in the thirties, it’s the waning days of Imperialism, and this may, too, be excusable.

And those are just the problems I have with the concept of the film. Because I have problems with the packaging of the film, too, because the box firmly states that the crisis of the film is Robert Conway’s (the ever dashing Ronald Colman) struggle to return to the paradise he had left, and then regretted. But, really, that’s only the last half an hour of a film that runs over two hours long, and, we see nothing of this anyway; it’s narrated by some random British gentleman, talking to his friends in some random British club. But what’s weirder is that I had the “restored” version, where they’d manage to find some film and the entire soundtrack from the original release, and a number of these restored scenes, were nothing more than still pictures of the actors while the lines went on, leaving the audience to look at each other in wonder and try and figure out what was going on in vanished scenes. And it’s probably better not to get into technical questions, about how high an airplane without pressurizing can fly, and how the panicking American nearly got out the door at high altitude, and where the plumber, inspired to improve Shangri-La’s plumbing, is going to get the pipes to do it, and why the palace in Shangri-La has a very thirties sort of architecture.

Discounting all this, and despite its cute bits and its romantic bits and its interesting concept and a number of wonderful and thoughtful lines given to our hero; too much of the film appeared more to distract from the substance of the drama, which is Conway’s dissatisfaction with his life in pursuit of worldly power and the tension between what he wants, represented by Jane Wyatt and Shangri-La, and what his brother and his country want from him. Had the brother been a stronger character, had the story been tighter, had the most interesting part of the action been shown rather than explained…. it might have been a more enjoyable experience, but as it is, I spent most of the film wishing I’d gotten Wuthering Heights (1939) instead. Lost Horizon may just be too much a product of its time to get through to me.