To lambaste a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge. At first, with his remakes of Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life, and Madame X, he was involved in camp parasitism. Since the phenomenal success of Airport, he has become America’s most sanctimonious apostle of old-movie-queen glamour and the kitsch of our ancestors. Now he brings us his Lost Horizon. In a sense, all his movies are lost horizons; they’re for people nostalgic for a simpler pop culture. He is to movies what Liberace is to music, and once, on a television talk show, I saw them both — Hunter castigating “dirty entertainment,” and Liberace leaning over, his jacket twinkling, to say how much he agreed — and the two unctuous smiles came together. Mr. Bland and Mr. Bland.
James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, with its inspired gimmick — longevity — was published in 1933 and took off immediately; the name Shangri-La was already in widespread use in this country as both a dream and a joke before the first movie version, in 1937. Ross Hunter’s version, directed by Charles Jarratt, is in color and is padded out with a wan operetta score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Hunter has retained Hilton’s invincibly banal ideas — virgo intacta, so to speak — though the screenwriter, Larry Kramer, has made some cosmetic changes in the minor characters, the most amusing of which is the transformation of the hysterical prostitute into a hysterical, world-weary woman photographer from Newsweek — she, too, is redeemed. Set in uncharted territory high in the Himalayas, Shangri-La is a middle-class geriatric utopia — an idealized retirement village, where, if you’re sensible and do everything in moderation, you can live indefinitely, lounging and puttering about for hundreds of years. The “harmony” and the air in this magical valley will cure your diseases and mend your aching broken bones. It’s a prospectus conceived by a super con artist. The valley is ruled by a benevolent despot — the High Lama — and his male factotums, and the “harmony” must be protected by discreet restrictive covenants, since the Orientals are kept in their places, and no blacks, or even the brown-skinned people of nearby India, are among the residents. There’s probably no way to rethink this material without throwing it all away. Shangri-La is the embodiment of an aging, frightened white man’s dream — a persistent one, even though the cheery-goody haven, with its innocent pleasures, that Ross Hunter concocts is so vapid that the inhabitants might be driven to slide down the mountains to the nearest Sin City. Hunter has carried his campaign for moral cleanliness on the screen to unprecedented chastity. The actresses are as covered up as if they were in purdah. There are no love songs, and there isn’t a chemical trace of sexual attraction in the pairs of “lovers” — Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch (as Conway), Sally Kellerman (as the hysteric from Newsweek) and George Kennedy, Olivia Hussey and Michael York. Two of the songs involve happy, frolicking children, and the big production number is a peasant celebration of the family called “Living Together, Growing Together.” (The biggest laugh in the theater greeted the arrival of the young men of the village — Broadway-style and mostly Caucasian men dancers, whose progeny in the film are Oriental.)
The leads are pitilessly miscast. As Conway in the old version, Ronald Colman had a fatuous charm; he spoke his lines rhythmically, and they glided by and could be taken with faintly pleased derision. But Finch, a firm, unobtrusive actor who creates characters, has no personality-star resources to fall back on. His shrouded performance consists of a series of sickly, noble little smiles, as if to reassure himself and his fellow-actors that this role, too, will pass. He’s sympathetic in a stolid way that makes one wince for him when he’s called upon to speak — or, worse, to soliloquize in song. Liv Ullmann, cast in what was a hopeless dear-sweet role even in the first version, manages to keep her dignity, though dignity on the screen is practically a negative quality. It’s easy to forget that she’s in the picture — which, all things considered, is probably the best thing that could happen to her; Finch is too painfully aware of his predicament to be forgotten. Nor can we forget the ingénue (played by the pregnant Olivia Hussey) twirling heavily and being told by the adoring Michael York that in the outside world people would fight to see her dance. The altitude seems to have got to everybody. From the tone of the lyrics that Hal David gave the performers, he must have enlisted in Moral Re-Armament. At his most vigorous, poor Finch expresses himself in these words:
Will I find
There is really such a thing
As peace of mind?
And what I thought was living
Was truly just confusion,
The chance to live forever
Is really no illusion
And this all can be mine.
Why can’t I make myself believe it?
Can I accept what I see around me?
Have I found Shangri-La or has it found me?
To which his Tibetan little chickadee, Liv Ullmann, rejoins:
Where knowledge ends — faith begins
And it shines like a star
Till your heart fills with hope and with love.
I have looked in your heart,
I have faith in you.
This flatulent salvationary spirit is to be Shangri-La’s gift to the world. It is the belief of the High Lama (Charles Boyer) that Shangri-La is an oasis of culture, and that when “the strong have devoured each other” this valley of brotherly love, with Finch as its ruler, will guide the meek survivors out of chaos. Shangri-La is nice people’s idea of a cultural oasis. There is no discussion of ideas in the valley, no printing, no creative life, virtually no arts, or even crafts; everything is brought in from outside. And the government is invisible. Shangri-La hasn’t solved any of the problems that drive nations to war; the story simply omits them. (Asked what would happen if two men wanted the same woman, the chief factotum, Chang — John Gielgud — replies that then the man who wanted her less would courteously yield to the other. Is it assumed that a woman necessarily wants the man who loves her most?) The have-nots are cheerful and obedient, and the haves enjoy their position. (The source of wealth is unspecified, but the valley is rich in gold, and, from the looks of the chintzy furnishings, it has been used “in moderation.”) The culture consists of a collection of books, handsomely bound in leather, in a wood-paneled library. We don’t have to be told that it’s not for the use of the Asian peasants and servants; it’s definitely not a lending library. In this place that’s going to guide the world, knowledge is for storage only. No one has apparently ever thought of consulting those books to learn how to build a dam, so the peasant women wouldn’t have to carry water, bucket by bucket, from a stream. It’s a dead culture they’re preserving in their mausoleum, like a rich college’s rare-book collection.
A daydream world of peace and health is best left to the imagination; constructed, it turns into a sanitarium, or worse. After directing Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles Jarrott could have been selected for another spectacle only by a producer who wanted a man with no style and no personality — just a traffic manager. With their talents pooled, Hunter and Jarrott turn the valley of eternal life into the valley of eternal rest — a Himalayan Forest Lawn. It’s not as if they had destroyed anything of value. Ross Hunter never starts with anything that one need have anxiety for. The 1937 movie was part popular adventure and part senile sentimentality, but Frank Capra, who directed, made the initial trip through the icy wastes lively, gave the think-tank vision a little cracker-barrel enthusiasm, and kept some pace even in the midst of all that serenity. Jarrott’s version lacks visual contrasts, the narrative has no energy, and the pauses for the pedagogic songs are so awkward you may feel that the director’s wheelchair needs oiling. It’s entirely possible that to the nostalgic viewers Ross Hunter is aiming at, this torpor will be soothing. They may like to doze from time to time without fear of missing anything.
“It adds years to your life,” the young men from Calcutta in Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest say of the country quiet, and it’s easy to believe. Ray’s images are so emotionally saturated that they become suspended in time and, in some cases, fixed forever. Satyajit Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director. I think it must be because our involvement with his characters is so direct that we are caught up in a blend of the fully accessible and the inexplicable, the redolent, the mysterious. We accept the resolutions he effects not merely as resolutions of the stories but as truths of human experience. Yet it isn’t only a matter of thinking, Yes, this is the way it is. What we assent to is only a component of the pattern of associations in his films; to tell the stories does not begin to suggest what the films call to mind or why they’re so moving. There is always a residue of feeling that isn’t resolved. Two young men sprawled on a porch after a hot journey, a drunken group doing the Twist in the dark on a country road, Sharmila Tagore’s face lit by a cigarette lighter, her undulating walk in a sari — the images are suffused with feeling and become overwhelmingly, sometimes unbearably beautiful. The emotions that are imminent may never develop, but we’re left with the sense of a limitless yet perhaps harmonious natural drama that the characters are part of. There are always larger, deeper associations impending; we recognize the presence of the mythic in the ordinary. And it’s the mythic we’re left with after the ordinary has been (temporarily) resolved.
When Days and Nights in the Forest, which was made in 1969, was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1970, it received a standing ovation, and it seemed so obvious that a film of this quality — and one more immediate in its appeal than many of Ray’s works — would be snapped up by a distributor that I waited to review it upon its theater opening. But distributors are often lazy men who don’t bother much with festivals, least of all with films that are shown at the dinner hour (it went on at six-thirty); they wait for the Times. The review was condescendingly kindly and brief — a mere five and a half inches, and not by the first-string critic — and Days and Nights in the Forest, which is a major film by a major artist, is finally opening, two and a half years later, for a week’s run at a small theater. On the surface, it is a lyrical romantic comedy about four educated young men from Calcutta driving together for a few days in the country, their interrelations, and what happens to them in the forest, which is both actual and metaphorical. As the men rag each other and bicker, we quickly sort them out. Ashim is a rising executive and the natural leader of the group. Lordly and disdainful to underlings, he is the worst-behaved; the most intelligent, he is also the most dissatisfied with his life and himself — he feels degraded. He and Sanjoy, who is more polite and reticent, used to slave on a literary magazine they edited, but they have settled down. Ashim is much like what Apu might have turned into if he had been corrupted, and he is played by Soumitra Chatterji, who was Apu in The World of Apu. On this holiday in the forest, Ashim meets Aparna, played by the incomparably graceful Sharmila Tagore (who ten years before, when she was fourteen, played Aparna, Apu’s exquisite bride). In his fine book on the Apu Trilogy, Robin Wood wrote that the physical and spiritual beauty of Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore seems “the ideal incarnation of Ray’s belief in human potentialities.” And I think they represent that to Ray, and inspire him to some of his finest work (he used them also in Devi) because they are modern figures with overtones of ancient deities. Unlike the other characters in Days and Nights in the Forest, they bridge the past and the future and — to some degree — India and the West. As Ray uses them, they embody more than we can consciously grasp. But we feel it: when Sharmila Tagore in her sunglasses and white slacks stands still for a second, she’s a creature of fable — the image carries eternity. Even her melodious voice seems old and pure, as if it had come through fire.
Ashim has been strangling in the business bureaucracy of Calcutta; frustrated, he has become an egotist, and confidently condescending to women. Aparna, a city girl vacationing at her father’s house in the forest along with her widowed sister-in-law, is not impressed by his big-city line. Her irony and good sense cut through his arrogance, and, made to feel foolish, he rediscovers his humanity. Underneath their love story, and the stories of Ashim’s companions, there’s the melancholy and corruption of their class and country. In a quiet way, the subtext is perhaps the subtlest, most plangent study of the cultural tragedy of imperialism the screen has ever had. It is the tragedy of the bright young generation who have internalized the master race (like many of the refugees from Hitler who came to America); their status identity is so British that they treat all non-Anglicized Indians as non-persons. The caste system and the British attitudes seem to have conspired to turn them into self-parodies — clowns who ape the worst snobberies of the British. The highest compliment the quartet can bestow on Aparna’s father’s cottage is to say, “The place looks absolutely English.” We don’t laugh at them, though, because they’re achingly conscious of being anachronistic and slightly ridiculous. When we see them playing tennis in the forest, the image is so ambiguous that our responses come in waves.
Ray not only directed but did the screenplay (from a novel by Sunil Ganguly), drew the credit titles, and wrote the music. His means as a director are among the most intuitively right in all moviemaking: he knows when to shift the camera from one face to another to reveal the utmost, and he knows how to group figures in a frame more expressively than anyone else. He doesn’t butt into a scene; he seems to let it play itself out. His understatement makes most of what is thought of as film technique seem unnecessary, and even decadent, because he does more without it. (No Western director has been able to imitate him.) The story is told with great precision at the same time that the meanings and associations multiply. Ray seems to add something specifically Eastern to the “natural” style of Jean Renoir. Renoir, too, put us in unquestioning and total — yet discreet — contact with his people, and everything seemed fluid and easy, and open in form. But Renoir’s time sense is different. What is distinctive in Ray’s work (and it may be linked to Bengali traditions in the arts, and perhaps to Sanskrit) is that sense of imminence — the suspension of the images in a larger context. The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on. There is a rapt, contemplative quality in the beautiful intelligence of his ideal lovers. We’re not at all surprised in this film that both Ashim and Aparna have phenomenal memories; we knew that from looking at them.
Ray takes a risk when he contrasts his poetic sense of time against the hasty Western melodramatic tradition. One of the four young men is a figure in the sporting world — Hari, who is quick-tempered and rash. He has just been jilted by a dazzler of a girl for his insensitivity. (He answered a six-page letter from her in a single curt sentence.) Hari picks up a local “tribal” girl in the forest for some fast sex, and he is also attacked and almost killed by a servant he has wrongly accused of stealing. The scenes relating to Hari (especially those dealing with the equally thoughtless local girl) feel very thin and unconvincing, because they are conventional. They have no mystery, no resonance, and though this is surely deliberate, the contrast doesn’t succeed; the scenes seem more contrived than they would in an American movie. In a scene by a river, Sharmila Tagore’s glance brings Hari back into the film’s harmony, but he goes out again. The fourth young man, Sekhar, has no subplot; he’s a plump buffoon, a fawning hanger-on, who drops pidgin-English phrases into his conversation as if they were golden wit. Like Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson in Africa, he’s a joke the British left behind. Nothing happens to him; spinelessly affable, he behaves in the country as he does in the city.
It is the shy Sanjoy who has the worst experience. Aparna’s sister-in-law, the young, heavily sensual widow, makes a physical overture to him. She has been flirting with him for days, and we have observed the ordinariness of her middle-class character, listened to the coyness in her slightly disagreeable voice; we know that he is flattered by her attention and oblivious of the import of her broad smiles and provocative, teasing manner. When she lures him in at night with an offer of real coffee and puts her hand on his chest, we see his stricken face, and we are torn in half. She hadn’t seen in him what we had, or he in her. Ray, without our full awareness, has prepared us, and now we are brought closer to them both than we had ever anticipated. This desperately lonely woman might be too much for most men, and this man is less secure than most. The moment of his petrified indecision about how to retreat and her realization of the rejection is a fully tragic experience. Ray is a master psychologist: the pain for us is the deeper because Ray had made her so coarse-grained that we hadn’t cared for her; now her humiliation illuminates what was going on in her while we were dismissing her for her middle-classness and the tension in her voice. No artist has done more than Satyajit Ray to make us reëvaluate the commonplace. And only one or two other film artists of his generation — he’s just past fifty — can make a masterpiece that is so lucid and so inexhaustibly rich. At one point, the four young blades and the two women sit in a circle on picnic blankets and play a memory game that might be called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; it’s a pity that James Agee didn’t live to see the films of Satyajit Ray, which fulfill Agee’s dreams.
[March 17, 1973]