Flashback, March 1937: ‘Lost Horizon’ Inspires One Classic, One Disaster

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 20^th-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 (42^nd 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.