Most of his works are not read these days, but in the
two decades before his death in 1954, the English writer James Hilton churned
out a stream of novels eagerly snatched up by the public. Several of these were
adapted to film, including two that became classics in the 1930s: Goodbye,
Mr. Chips, about a beloved longtime British prep-school teacher, and Lost Horizon.
The latter film premiered in Los Angeles on March 10,
1937. Directed by Columbia Pictures’ ace director, Frank Capra (who
would later helm the Yuletide evergreen, It’s a Wonderful Life), it
fulfilled initial expectations as the studio’s biggest “prestige” project to
that point. Over the years, this film about Shangri-La, an idyllic place deep
in the Himalayas, secluded from a war-torn outside world, has maintained its
high reputation.
Not the least of the movie’s virtues was its music, created by rookie film composer Dimitri Tiomkin, which supported the action on screen without upstaging it. Thirty-five years later, producer Ross Hunter decided to make music the focus of a remake.
The difference between the two versions can be
summarized in this way: Capra’s launched one career, started a longtime
collaboration and friendship, created a catchphrase, and became a classic.
Hunter’s derailed several careers, disrupted a couple of collaborations and
friendships, sparked a host of legendary wisecracks, and became a camp
classic. Oh, and did I mention that it led to a messy tangle of litigation and
may have contributed to a divorce?
Everybody associates Capra’s name with the first film.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a movie fan who could name the director of the
remake without consulting a printed or Internet reference. (If you really must
know, it was Charles Jarrott, who had handled Anne of the Thousand Days
with far less incident only five years before.) No, the names associated with
the remake were not a director, but the previously golden lyricist Hal David
and composer Burt Bacharach.
Why did one project (at least largely) succeed while
the other became a fiasco? The difference between success and failure is seldom
as clear-cut as it seems at first, and Capra’s version flashed alarming signs
of being a stinker at an initial preview in Santa Barbara. Nevertheless,
several factors undoubtedly meant vastly different fates for the two motion
pictures:
1) Attention to pacing. Columbia boss Harry Cohn was notorious for claiming that his
twitching behind was a sure sign that a film was in trouble. (Upon hearing
this, wiseguy screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz famously cracked: “Just
imagine—the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!”) His subordinates developed
similar tendencies, perhaps none more so than Capra, who, after hearing howls
of laughter at the preview, spent more than two days sweating out what to do
before cutting the first two reels. That single change shortened the film by 20
minutes and grabbed the audience by the lapels with a spectacular opening
scene: the burning of a city. In contrast, the remake featured the title tune,
then did not feature another song until nearly another 40 minutes had elapsed.
True, it’s hard to imagine what song Bacharach and David could have concocted
to fill the space. (I don’t think “I’m a-Dyin’ on a Jet Plane,” as a British
diplomat and his fellow passengers brace themselves for a crash landing while
fleeing unrest in Southeast Asia, would have worked). But without something,
audiences must have twitching for the music to start in earnest, even if it turned out to be middle-of-the-road pap--which it did.
2 2) Actors exactly right for the
lead roles. If you’ve seen David O. Selznick’s adaptation of A
Tale of Two Cities, it’s impossible to imagine anyone topping the portrayal
by Ronald Colman of brilliant, world-weary, damaged
Sydney Carton. Lost Horizon’s Robert Conway might have been a 20th-century
diplomat rather than an attorney during the French Revolution, but he was the
same psychological type. Capra correctly insisted to Cohn that Colman was the
only “actor in the world to play the lead,” then pulled another coup by
casting, against far more studio opposition, 38-year-old Sam Jaffe to play the
ancient High Lama. If only the casting of the leads had been similarly
impeccable in the Hunter version. Now, it’s true that Hollywood had grown
accustomed, over the last decade or so, to dubbing for actors who couldn’t
sing. But to employ three nonsinging principals in the same movie (Peter
Finch, in Colman’s role, along with Liv Ullman and Olivia Hussey) was really
pushing matters.
3) Composers and music suitable for the project. Capra went to bat not only for his cast, but for his composer—and it
was an even bigger gamble. Tiomkin, an ex-concert pianist, had no track record
in scoring to speak of. Yet Capra backed him to the hilt. (The director’s only
attempt to pull his punches was to hire, as the conductor, famed
movie composer Max Steiner—who, Capra was certain, would assume control of this
score if he sensed trouble. It wasn’t necessary, for, as the director crowed later,
“Tiomkin’s music not only captured the mood, but it darned near captured the
film.” Hunter wasn’t so lucky in getting studio execs to back his choice for
the music, Michel Legrand. In one sense,
their feelings were understandable. Legrand might have created fine music for
several films (including The Thomas Crown Affair and Summer of ’42),
but his experience with musicals was nil. (In fact, he would not have his first, Amour, until nearly 30 years later. It flopped, but at least, for his fans, it has become a noble failure on the order of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro or Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.) Bacharach and David not only had an
Oscar in hand for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” but had also created the
Broadway hit Promises, Promises (not to mention 39 charting singles from 1962 to 1970 with Dionne Warwick alone). But their success with Promises, Promises, I’d
argue, was chimerical. The latter did as well as it did largely
because of Neil Simon, who had crafted funny, tight books for Little Me
and an uncredited pinch-hit for Sweet Charity.
4) A sense of the zeitgeist. Capra’s film
appeared at a point when horror over World War I and indignation at the
propaganda and profiteering generated by it had mounted so high that
isolationist legislation threatened to hamstring FDR’s response to
Fascism.(Later, after WWII broke out, an anti-war monologue by Colman was
deleted, lest it interfere with the war effort.) “The world was hungry for a
lift,” Capra wrote in his memoir, The Name Above the Title, “hungry for quickening examples of how individuals overcome
the dreads of their environment.” Though there was some question about whether Lost
Horizon really was a money-maker for Columbia, there seems little reason to dispute
Capra’s contention that its release, publicity drumbeat, and favorable critical
reception lured a host of filmmakers to the studio.
In the 1930s, Capra’s feel for the popular pulse
seldom faltered. Hunter’s, on the other hand, proved abysmal. For the past
half-dozen years, various Hollywood attempts to duplicate the megablockbuster
success of The Sound of Music—i.e., Doctor Doolittle, Star, Hello
Dolly, and, yes, and adaptation of Hilton's Goodbye Mr. Chips—had failed dismally. The powers that be missed
the new style of musical sequences ushered in by the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s
Night, in which director Richard Lester filmed the Fab Four in performance
rather than as characters breaking out into song. The possibilities of such
naturalistic filming were exploited in an unprecedented fashion in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret,
in which the songs comment on the plot but the characters themselves sing in
traditional performance venues.
More than ever, audiences sensed the enormous
anachronism of characters bursting spontaneously into song in Bacharach and
David’s Lost Horizon. And, in a year when the wounds of the Vietnam War
remained open and the crimes of Watergate were exposed, it seemed positively
ludicrous to listen to a song called “Share the Joy.”
Bacharach and David were old enough—and well-connected
enough in the songwriting fraternity—to remember that even the great songwriter
Harry Warren (42nd Street)
had stumbled with his 1956 Broadway musical adaptation of Hilton’s novel, Shangri-La, which lasted a mere 21
performances. The fate of that show should have given them pause.
But if your lyrics are being sung by the likes of
Dusty Springfield, Jackie DeShannon, Tom Jones, Dionne Warwick, and too many
others to keep count—or, better yet, if your music has led to an Oscar for Best
Song and you’re married to Angie Dickinson—well, it’s hard to think that much
is denied you.
It was as inevitable that this extraordinary streak of
successes would come to an end as that the fall would be so spectacular.
Tensions had begun to surface even before Hunter signed Bacharach and David to
this project, and additional strains—including what Bacharach felt was his disproportionate
share in trying to keep this project from falling apart—finally tore the two
collaborators apart. (Warwick, whose recording contract involved them producing
her work, ended up collateral damage, and her suit against them only widened
the litigation morass now unfolding.) The reviews were atrocious (according to the ever-quotable John Simon, the movie "must have arrived in garbage rather than film cans"), and the box
office was so bad that the film shortly became nicknamed “Lost Investment.” The film ended up losing $9 million, or an inflation-adjusted $47 million.
(Actually, preview audiences sensed the turkey coming even sooner. They laughed even harder than those that had given Capra heart palpitations 35 years before. The cause: this musical, featuring what Hunter had claimed would be "wholesome entertainment," featured a "fertility dance" replete with heavily oiled and toned guys frantically running around, as if they had lost their way to the health club. Still, the decision to yank the sequence might have been a mistake: At least it made audiences howl. The rest of the footage made them yawn.)
And so, as audiences followed the image of a plane going down in flames in Asia, they also were watching the crash-and-burn of one of the half-dozen most successful songwriting teams of the last decade; the prolonged depression of Bacharach, as he absorbed the blows from critics ready to pile on after his great success; and, perhaps not surprisingly, the end of his marriage to Dickinson.
When you consider this fallout, I’m sure that
Bacharach has, over the years, tuned out anything reminding him of this
project, whether indirect (the news of a version of Capra’s original, with
the antiwar material restored) or direct (the announcement of a DVD release of
the musical). This year, however, as he works on his memoir, Anyone Who Had a Heart (due out this
November), he might at last be forced to dredge up all these bad memories.
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