A Film Canon

 

 

Lost Horizon elaborates 'Shangri-La', the collaborative fantasy of a group of airplane crash survivors, including a white-collar criminal, who is presented with the opportunity to redeem himself, a terminally-ill woman, who is presented with the prospect of extreme longevity, a palaeontologist, who is presented with an antiquity far greater than that of the Megatherium claw that he carries in his luggage (to the extent that it feels as if the settlement is akin to another planet, a completely separate geological space, analogous to its tight meteorological and geographical boundaries) and, above all, a pacifist (Ronald Colman), who is effectively presented with himself, in the form of the High Lama that he has unwittingly been brought to replace, prompting his reflection: "Did you ever go to a totally strange place and feel certain you'd been there before?" The result is an intensely cerebral atmosphere, bolstered by the Lama's characterisation of the settlement as a cultural reliquary set against impending apocalypse, as well as the sublime whiteness of the buildings and extended alpine sequences. At its strongest, this imbues every encounter with the quality of a single mind conversing with itself, gesturing towards a paradisial future in which foreign affairs might take this form, or, more accurately, be rendered redundant by it. In this way, Capra continues The Bitter Tea Of General Yen's commitment to conversation, and provides a dramatic counterpoint to the equally strong, if comically-inflected, commitment of his screwball comedies. That said, this strategy does, by definition, mitigate against cultural difference, as evinced in the Lama's reduction of Buddhist precepts to moderation and good manners, whose real ideological backbone is explicated in his anticipation of a moment when "the Christian ethic may at last be fulfilled."