| Lost Horizon | |
|---|---|
film poster by Howard Terpning |
|
| Directed by | Charles Jarrott |
| Produced by | Ross Hunter |
| Written by | Larry Kramer |
| Starring | Peter Finch John Gielgud Liv Ullmann Sally Kellerman Olivia Hussey Charles Boyer George Kennedy Michael York |
| Music by | Burt Bacharach Hal David |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | March 17, 1973 |
| Running time | 150 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $12 million |
| Box office | $3 million (US)[1] |
Lost Horizon is a 1973 musical film directed by Charles Jarrott and starring Peter Finch, John Gielgud, Liv Ullmann, Michael York, Sally Kellerman, Bobby Van, George Kennedy, Olivia Hussey, James Shigeta and Charles Boyer.
The film is a remake of Frank Capra's film of the same name, with a screenplay by Larry Kramer. Both the 1937 film and this one had their story from James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon.
This was final film produced by Ross Hunter.
Contents |
This version is much closer to the 1937 film than to the original James Hilton novel. It tells the story of a group of travellers whose airplane is hijacked while fleeing a bloody revolution. The airplane crash lands in an unexplored area of the Himalayas, where the party is rescued and taken to the lamasery of Shangri-La. Miraculously, Shangri-La, sheltered by mountains on all sides, is a temperate paradise amid the land of snows. Perfect health is the norm, and inhabitants live to very old age while maintaining a youthful appearance.
The newcomers quickly adjust to life in Shangri-La, especially Richard Conway (Peter Finch), the group's leader. He meets and falls in love with Catherine (Liv Ullmann), a school teacher. Sally Hughes (Sally Kellerman), a drug-addicted Newsweek photographer is suicidal at first, but begins counselling with lamas Chang (John Gielgud) and To Len (James Shigeta) and discovers a new lease of life. Sam Cornelius (George Kennedy) discovers gold, but Sally convinces him to use his engineering skills to bring better irrigation to the famers of Shangri-La instead of attempting to smuggle the gold out. Harry Lovett (Bobby Van) is a third-rate comic and song and dance man who discovers he has a flair for working with the children of Shangri-La. Everyone is content to stay except Conway's younger brother, George (Michael York). George has fallen in love with Maria (Olivia Hussey), a dancer, and wants to take her with him when he leaves. Chang warns Richard that Maria came to Shangri-La over eighty years before, at the age of twenty. If she were to leave the valley she would quickly revert to her actual age.
Richard is summoned to meet the High Lama (Charles Boyer), who informs him that he was brought there for a reason, to take over the leadership of the community when he himself dies. However, the night that the High Lama dies, George and Maria tell Richard that everything the High Lama and Chang have said is a lie, and convince him to leave with them immediately. Richard is still in shock from the High Lama's death, and leaves without even saying goodbye to Catherine. Not long after their departure Maria suddenly ages and dies, and George falls to his death down an icy ravine. Richard struggles on alone, ending up in a hospital bed in the Himalayan foothills. He runs away, back to the mountains, and miraculously finds the portal to Shangri-La once more.
Lost Horizon is considered one of the last in a string of box office musical failures which came in the wake of the success of The Sound of Music.[2] Attempts to update the idea of Shangri-La with its racial inequalities intact, coupled with old-fashioned songs effectively sealed its fate. Pauline Kael noted that Shangri-La was depicted as:
a middle-class geriatric utopia [where]... you can live indefinitely, lounging and puttering about for hundreds of years... the Orientals are kept in their places, and no blacks... are among the residents. There's probably no way to rethink this material without throwing it all away.[3]
After derided preview screenings[4] Columbia Pictures re-cut the film, but to no avail. Critic John Simon remarked that it "must have arrived in garbage rather than in film cans". The songs were written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, whose long partnership hit rocky ground within months of this film's release. The film was such a poor performer at the box office that it was nicknamed "Lost Investment." Bette Midler called the musical "Lost Her-Reason" and famously quipped, "I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical." (Ullmann later appeared in Richard Rodgers' last Broadway musical, I Remember Mama, yet another flop for the "Swedish nightingale," adapted from the John Van Druten play and dubbed "I Dismembered Mama.") [5]
The film was selected for inclusion in the book "50 Worst Films of All Time," co-written by film critic Michael Medved.
However Peter Finch has said he enjoyed making the film.[6]
Larry Kramer has publicly acknowledged that he's not particularly proud of his workmanlike job adapting the original film-script for this film. However, hot on the heels of Kramer's Oscar-nomination for the screenplay for Women in Love, the deal he engineered for this, combined with savvy investments, made it possible for him to live the rest of his creative life free of financial worries. In that sense, this film enabled Kramer to devote himself to the gay community activism and the writings (e.g., his ground-breaking AIDS play, The Normal Heart) which came later.
The soundtrack was moderately more successful than the film, peaking at #56 on the Billboard Hot 200. The title song was performed by Shawn Phillips.
Of the lead actors, only Sally Kellerman, Bobby Van, and James Shigeta perform their own singing. Olivia Hussey, Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann were dubbed by Andra Willis, Jerry Whitman, and Diana Lee respectively. The song "Living Together, Growing Together" was a minor hit for The 5th Dimension. The song "Things I Will Not Miss" was covered by Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye during recording sessions for the 1973 album Diana and Marvin.
Large parts of the score were deleted after the film's road show release. The dance sections of "Living Together, Growing Together" were cut, and the master negatives lost. "If I Could Go Back", "Where Knowledge Ends (Faith Begins)", and "I Come To You" were cut, but restored for the laserdisc release of the film. All of the songs appear on the soundtrack LP and CD. According to the notes on the laserdisc release, Kellerman and Kennedy had a reprise of "Living Together, Growing Together" that was also lost.
On October 11, 2011, Columbia Classics, the Manufactured on Demand unit of Columbia Pictures Home Video, released a fully restored version of the film on DVD, which reinstated all of the elements cut after the roadshow release. The DVD also contains supplemental features, including promos featuring producer Ross Hunter as well as the original song demos played and sung by composer Burt Bacharach. Some of these demos contain different Hal David lyrics than the final versions utilized in the film.
|
|||||||||||||||||