(1973/Columbia Pictures)
Rave Reviews
“You can’t help laughing at it—its Shangri-La… is about as alluring as Forest Lawn!” — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
“A misbegotten mishmash of mystical musings and 70s stylings … [an] ungainly kitschfest.”
— David Marc Fischer, Entertainment Weakly
“Hungry for [a] memorably, side-splittingly bad [movie]? Here’s 143 minutes’ worth!”
— Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello, Bad Movies We Love
Plot, What Plot? Perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein could have made a palatable musical out of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, given its vague thematic similarities to both South Pacific and The King and I. Instead, schlocky ’70s songmeisters Burt Bacharach and Hal David, together with schmaltz-and-kitsch king Ross Hunter, created a legendary box-office bomb so awful that it has never been released on video in the United States and is rarely even shown on cable. If you’re a bad-movie buff, this is one film you’ve always heard ranks among the worst ever made—and rank it is. And reek it does.
For its first half hour, this wholly unnecessary retelling of Frank Capra’s 1937 classic follows its progenitor almost shot-for-shot in establishing five characters whose plane escapes a war-torn Asian nation, only to crash in the Himalayas. In the midst of a snow-covered wilderness, they are rescued by a team of monks who bring them through the mountains to the legendary Valley of the Blue Moon, and to the paradise known as Shangri-La. Up to this point, you are left to ponder: Why did they bother to make this pale imitation of a classic film?
But once inside Shangri-La, such nonsinging stars as Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, Olivia Hussey, Sally Kellerman (!), and George Kennedy (!!) start bursting into song as if there’s LSD in the water. And they begin expressing their innermost (and mostly inane) thoughts in ludicrous lyrics courtesy of Mr. David. And they start hopping about like injured birds, hopelessly trying to pull off what they believe are dance numbers, under the direction of dinosaur Hermes Pan (whose past credits do include one Oscar thirty-six years earlier, but also include the similarly wretched 1959 remake of The Blue Angel).
Woven in and around this incredible collection of terpsichorean calamities is the basic plot of both Hilton’s novel and Capra’s film: Finch, as a world-renowned peace negotiator, has actually been kidnapped and brought to the Valley of the Blue Moon to take over for the 260-year-old high lama, played by Charles Boyer. You know Boyer’s important because he’s never forced to sing … and because whenever he appears onscreen, he has his own syrupy string section, screeching away to tug at our heartstrings. When Boyer dies, he slumps over in his chair, a flatulent breeze flaps at the curtains—and we know he must be dead, because those damned violins finally go silent.
To call this Horizon a lost cause would be an understatement. What saves it from the tedium of mere mediocrity are the unbelievably awful musical sequences, eleven in all. Each song sneaks up on the audience like a mugger on the subway, until you get leery every time you see a filtered shot of sunshine or two characters holding hands. “Oh my God,” you start thinking, “here comes another one!” But once you realize that not only is every one of them going to be lame, but that they progressively top one another in laughability you’ll find yourself awaiting the next number in a perverse, goggle-eyed, giggle-induced stupor.
Olivia Hussey kicks things off with “Share the Joy,” which looks and sounds like it was concocted to launch a new line of perfume at Macy’s. Then it’s Liv Ullmann’s turn: She leads a gaggle of gag-inducing moppets in the irksomely repetitive “The World Is a Circle.” By the time you get to the fifth fiasco, a duet in the Shangri-La library between Hussey and Kellerman, you’re inoculated and ready for any ditzy dance move or risible rhyme Bacharach, David, or any club-footed, tone-deaf cast member can throw at you. Up to this song, you may have noticed that Finch is the only poorly dubbed nonsinger who never lip-syncs. All his numbers are heard echoing inside his head, as he adopts poses he thinks resemble those Richard Burton struck in Camelot. And when, in the restored version (!) of the film available on foreign DVD, his big number “If I Could Go Back” is seen for the first time in over thirty years, you’ll realize why he rarely lip-syncs: He quite simply cannot. The combination of the banal blather posing as lyrics and the utter insincerity with which Finch flaps his lips will astound you. But wait—Kellerman and Kennedy have a duet still coming up. When you see the two of them conversing at a riverside rock, make sure you’re not drinking milk—otherwise it’ll be spraying out your nose when you see the gawky/awkward hip-hopping “dance” Kellerman performs while advising goy George, “Your reflection reflects in everything you do, and everything you do … reflects on you!”
Lost Horizon reflected poorly on everyone associated with it. In fact, it is so widely reviled that it’s next to impossible to actually see for yourself. And once you have seen it, you still won’t believe what you’ve seen. This is one notoriously numbskulled Hollywood remake that gloriously lives down to its reputation.
Loopy Lyrics
Richard Conway (Peter Finch) doing an astonishingly awful job of lip-syncing, accompanied by a “Woo-Woo” chorus, blatting horns, and thump-and-pish drums:
“How do I know this is part of my real life?
If there’s no pain can I be sure I feel life? …
And what I thought was living is just confusion, the chance to live forever is no illusion …
Can I accept what I see all around me—
have I found Shangri-La … or has it found me?”
To see this famously failed film, you’ll have to go to extreme efforts: We suggest trying to find it on eBay, or watching it on some all-night/all-movie cable channel with very low standards and two and a half hours to fill at 3 a.m.
Fun Footnote
The version of Lost Horizon shown to the crowd that fled its Hollywood premiere included an extended “fertility dance” sequence which, as the reputed comedic highlight, was almost immediately cut out of the film—and has never been seen since.