![]() ![]() Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) – a suave Englishman who is thought soon to be appointed the next British Foreign Secretary.With the plane in the air, we are introduced to what will turn out to be the principal characters: ![]() At the last moment, he and the final handful of foreigners barely make it onto the last getaway plane as the runway is overrun with rioting combatants. At the airfield Conway shepherds the remaining Europeans onto any spare planes that can be found to rush the refugees out. The story goes through a classic narrative progression of four sections: journey to –> entry –> engage –> departure.Īt the beginning we find British diplomat Robert Conway sent to the war-torn Chinese city of Baskul to arrange for the escape of 90 Europeans who are trying to flee a violent local revolution. In fact the famous Latin American novel, Los Pasos Perdidos ( The Lost Steps, 1953) by Ajexo Carpentier takes up the same theme in a South American setting and is also a work well worth reading. But it is not just a heavenly place that we cherish from watching this story, but the heavenly state of mind that it engenders within the characters who visit this place. This Shangri-La turns out to be an idyllic utopia that we could only dream about, and the term “Shangri-La” entered the popular vocabulary as a term for a mythical paradise. The story concerns a small group of people who are brought against their will by serendipity to the obscure, hidden Tibetan kingdom of Shangri-La, where most of the action takes place. The film was eventually cut down to 132 minutes, but it was still not a box-office hit early on. When he was finished, Capra had a 3½-hour film, a length for which the viewing public of that day was not ready. The overruns were not due to expensive location photography – Capra relied on stock footage for many of the Tibetan mountain scenes – but instead was due to Capra’s extensive reshootings of various studio scenes. But Capra overran the budget by a considerable margin. The film was set in the Himalayas and had the largest (up to that time) production budget. It was then fashioned by the popular Hollywood director-screenwriter team of Frank Capra and Robert Riskin into what became a classic.Īctually, the film was not immediately a hit and ran into problems early on. The story of the film was based on the best-selling 1933 novel of the same name by James Hilton. Although it is not without some limitations, the film provides an eloquent narrative expression of two key cultural metaphors – the search for the ideal, harmonious society and our all-too-often failures to hold onto the truly miraculous things that we stumble upon in life. In the end, Horizon Line just sputters out.Lost Horizon (1937) is a film that probably everyone should see at some point. The filmmakers didn't seem to realize how silly these moments are or how much fun they could have been if this silliness had been acknowledged. Two sequences in particular - in which Jackson climbs out to duct-tape a leak in the fuel line and when Sara climbs out to do something even more dangerous - feel completely ridiculous. Then, during the suspense part - which this 92-minute movie takes a surprising amount of time to get to - things just never seem as intense or as scary as they could have been. That's pretty slim character development, and, other than their jobs, we don't really learn much more about the two leads. So, to avoid one, she simply gets up and walks out while Jackson is busy. We first meet Jackson and Sara sharing a last drink, with Sara explaining that she hates goodbyes. Unfortunately, Horizon Line doesn't really do either. This kind of thriller can work great if it finds the right balance between seriousness and silliness - and if it introduces characters who are worth caring about. It has a decent premise and is compact and nicely paced, but this trapped-in-a-plane thriller eventually nose-dives due to uninteresting characters, lack of suspense, and too much preposterousness. ![]()
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