Film Chronicle: Lost Horizon dir. by Frank Capra, and: Man of Aran, dir. by Robert Flaherty, and: The Edge of the World, dir. by Michael Powell, and: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, dir. by Zacharias Kunuk, and: Hud, dir. by Martin Ritt, and: Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, dir. by Claude Berri, and: The White Hell of Piz Palü, dir. by Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst, and: The Blue Light, dir. by Leni Riefenstahl, and: The Descendants, dir. by Alexander Payne, and: Detective Montalbano, dir. by Alberto Sironi (review)

The DC-2 airliner labors through high passes in the Himalayas, then crash-lands in the snow, spilling its dazed passengers out into the cold. They find amiable, fur-swathed Tibetans standing by to help them. Through narrow defiles everyone proceeds to a gigantic lamasery perched on a hillside, overlooking a temperate valley with streams and fertile fields. In that lamasery a coterie of cultivated intellectuals—English-speaking, piano-playing, art-object-collecting—presides over an idyllically happy native populace, defying time as they do so. Aging and death have been banished from this place. The travelers have come upon Shangri-La.

I am describing an early sequence from Lost Horizon (1937), directed by Frank Capra, adapted from James Hilton's bestselling novel. This is an adventure romance with capable star turns, by Ronald Colman as an English diplomat who exchanges action for serenity in Shangri-La, by Jane Wyatt as the beguiling maiden he finds there, and by Sam Jaffe as the 200-year-old sage who began his stay in Shangri-La as a missionary French priest and ends it as High Lama. Jaffe now seems inevitable in the part, but he was in fact only one of several actors considered and tested for it—part of a production history detailed in the extras included in Sony's new Bluray edition of the film. The history is a vastly complicated tale of changes to Robert Riskin's script and of shooting in every Southern California location imaginable, not to mention plane-crash scenes photographed inside a cold-storage warehouse so that the actors' steaming breaths would show up against a background of artificially manufactured snow augmented by bleached cornflakes. Movie magic! The Paramount chief Harry Cohn, trusting Capra as the director who had led the studio from Poverty Row to real success, allowed him to go way over budget but then insisted on cutting the picture ruthlessly. Some of the damage he did has been mitigated by restoration; a few lacunae remain.

As a film, Lost Horizon visibly belongs to Capra's oeuvre. Scenes inside the airliner, with their folksy humor and intimations of a little community coming into being, instantly recall the night-bus sequences of It Happened One Night. The film also belongs to the decade in which it was made, with documentary- or newsreel-style scenes in a war-torn China and with many adumbrations of a coming, cataclysmic world war. The idea of Shangri-La, however, belongs to something older than the 1930s and larger than Capra's (or James Hilton's) imagination. It belongs to the ancient longing for the Great Good Place. Shangri-La is a pastoral retreat; a utopia; an exotic lost world ringed by dangers, like the Kukuanaland of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines or the Kor of his She (the latter a story, it will be remembered, with another mysterious, mortality-defying ruler). Lost...