Lost Horizon 1973

Hiya mate,
Well, you sound more informed about my country than most people are. (It's OK, that's not a criticism of anyone -- it's not like we're a major player in the world.) I live in New South Wales too -- at the moment, in the outer western suburbs of Sydney, which is in the south-east corner of the country, though I grew up in the mountains and still consider them my real home. Fortunately, nowhere in Australia is particularly far from wilderness -- even our bigger cities have what are termed "green belts", that are generally declared national parks and are protected from urbanisation.

I well understand the impulse to shy away from the term "bush", given the last eight years of your country's history. Must have been very difficult for people who felt his policies were damaging your country -- its standing in the world, as well as its economy and social fabric. It's just a subjective perception, but it seems to me that the US is much more bitter, dogmatic and polarised in its thinking now than it was eight years ago, but whether Bush had anything to do with that or was simply in the hot seat at the same time as that trend occurred, I really can't say. How can we know for sure what the US might have been like in 2009 if Al Gore had actually been acknowledged the winner in the year 2000? Maybe Obama would never have risen to prominence or been elected -- who knows?

We've had a similar situation here -- well, similar in some ways. Our Prime Minister for the last 12 years, a conservative, left office with the country's budget in significant surplus, whereas your previous President seems to have gone a long way towards bankrupting your country; but there are similarities. Like yours, our leader's policies relied on the politics of division and derision, and caused significant damage to the country's social fabric. Laws forced through by way of Howard's majority in both houses of parliament included some grossly repressive measures (as in the US' "Patriot Act"), excused in the name of the so-called "War on Terror", that are nothing short of totalitarian and severely impede some fairly basic civil rights. Under Howard, medical and dental care have become almost inaccessible for a significant proportion of the population, and tertiary education -- which has been largely government funded in this country for the last 40 years, in recognition that it shouldn't be a privilege of fortunate birth and that the money spent was an investment in the future well-being of our society as a whole -- has been reframed as a product for purchase (their actual words), and has escalated in cost out of most people's reach, so that it has returned to being really only an option for the rich. Most Americans get freaked if you trot out the word "socialist", but until Howard we had a lot of the good qualities of that approach to life going for us. But not any more.

A bit sad, for the country that had the first Labo(u)r government anywhere in the world! Oh, and to answer your question, when that party was founded, no-one was certain how best to spell its name. For a while it appeared under both spellings, but early in the 20th century there was concerted activism here by labour union organisers from the US; and as the story goes, by the time they'd left, the US spelling of the name had pretty well stuck, and the party decided not to change it. It was apparently felt that the atypical spelling distinguished the party's name from the general concept, and gave it a separate identity. And that's how it remained.

As for the Gaelic ... well, even apart from my personal connection with it, I really like it as a language. It really lends itself to poetic expression, and I personally find it fairly easy to learn -- its grammatical structures are pretty logical and straightforward, and actually have a lot in common with the slightly older styles of sentence construction in English. There's been a lot of cross-pollination through the two languages' development. It's a challenge for many people at first because it uses most of the same letters as in the English language, though the sounds they represent often don't compare at all; but for most people (myself included!) the real stumbling-block is that the language is highly colloquial, and phrases ideas in ways that don't appear to make sense to an English-speaker -- you just have to take them on faith and learn them parrot-fashion, and after a while they sort of have their own internal logic. After a while they *seem* to make sense, but much of it I would have trouble explaining in English words.

(I guess that's true of many languages, and I've learned a few now -- but Gaelic seems to be the most colloquial and opaque. Maybe there's something to be said for cellular racial memory, because it does seem to make sense, but not in a left-brain analytical sense. I wonder if there's such a thing as left-brain languages and right-brain languages?)

OK, back to LH -- yes, I think Errol would have made an admirable Robert Conway, and I think it's a genius suggestion. Onya, mate!! Much as I like Coleman as an actor, he often does seem a bit prim to me, a bit too thin-blooded. It probably suits the earnest tone of Capra's movie, but I do think a bit of Flynn's lust for life and wicked humour wouldn't have gone astray.

Oof. I seem to have written a dissertation!! Sorry about that ...

So how did you end up with a girlfriend who lives on the other side of the Atlantic?


You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Well, I'm not trying to change your mind either, my friend. We're just exchanging different (and some similar) points of view.

Director and cinematographer in fact do not work as one; they cooperate, discuss, but ultimately each has his own field of responsibility. Usually, of course, they complement one another's work and the relationship is seamless, but it's not quite accurate to say they work as one.

As to whether LH '73 is 'prestigeously mounted', well, no -- I don't see it. Does that make me wrong and you right? Nope. Just two different opinions...this isn't something factually ascertainable, like "debating" whether 2+2=4, with a definite right and wrong. The film is perfectly decently photographed, as I've said a couple of times; I just see nothing exceptional or extraordinary in its cinematography. But of course, Surtees was a great cinematographer -- a better cameraman than Jarrot was a director.

Segueing to...so what if The Other Side of Midnight was a box-office success? Is that a mark of quality? How many lousy movies have cleaned up at the box office, and how many good ones flopped? If the criterion for a "good director" is box office receipts then the director of the Saw films, for instance, would be one of the most acclaimed directors on the planet. Utterly irrelevant. TOSOM was a critically-panned movie. The Gene Siskel comment you cite was sarcasm -- a remark knocking the pretentiousness of the film, certainly not praise for a directing job well done. I never mentioned how well any of Jarrott's films did financially; obviously I was referring to something more important, if less tangible -- quality. Here again, what's "good" or "bad" is a matter of opinion, but the fact remains that most of Jarrot's films did not receive particularly good reviews.

Also, what's this about Jarrot's being "a very fine English director", as against your subsequent comments, "Who's comparing directors here? Capra was a popular AMERICAN director of American films." Excuse me, but what does birthplace have to do with anything? What, Jarrot is English, so therefore he's an international director of quality, as against Capra's American parochialism? Forgive me, but this is a completely inane comment, and not even accurate from a career standpoint. Yes, Jarrot was born in England. No, he was not an "English director" in the sense that he was initially, or even primarily, a director in England. He moved to Canada in the 50s and worked there for years (stage and TV), went back to Britain for a while in the 60s, then relocated to the US before Lost Horizon and remained here. Only three of his grand total of thirteen films were made in the UK, the rest (from 1973 on) in the US (or at least for US companies, regardless of filming locations). He was an adequate director but there was never anything special or unique about his work. He didn't even receive an Oscar nomination for directing his best film, Anne of the Thousand Days, even though the movie itself was nominated for Best Picture. Certainly he had talent, but there is nothing in his career to suggest any singularity or greatness. He is a virtually anonymous, little-known director of very variable output, with no consistency in his work.

As for Capra, to say that one of the WORLD'S most recognized and acclaimed directors was "an American director of American films" is preposterous nonsense. Okay, Capra worked out of Hollywood. So? This somehow disqualifies his films or himself from greatness or international recognition? Jarrot has mostly worked out of Hollywood. You seem to have no issue with that. Capra's films were (and remain) popular all over the world. He is one of the few directors whose name most people recognize, decades after his last work. He is the man chiefly responsible for a number of films almost universally recognized as genuine classics of the cinema. He won innumerable awards during his lifetime, including three Academy Awards in just five years. This isn't just an "American" view and Capra is no more simply, or only, an "American" director than John Ford, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, or hundreds of others. Jarrot was born in England? This is a "so-what" statement, but since it's been dragged into the discussion, Capra wasn't a native American either -- he was born in Palermo, Sicily. If point of origin is somehow meaningful, then Capra joins a long list of famed, foreign-born directors who made their marks in Hollywood -- William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Joseph von Sternberg, Fred Zinnemann...the list goes on and on, right through to the present day. US-made films may be "American", but they have been for over a century the standard of success for cinema worldwide, the most popular form of entertainment in the world. To say that Capra, or any of these other directors, was merely an "American" directing "American" films, as if these had no meaning or currency anywhere else, is ridiculous. And anyway, what has Jarrot done that compares to any of these people? Nothing. He's a non-descript director of foreign birth who's spent the vast majority of his career directing "American" films and TV movies.

Well, now that that tirade is over, yes, we'll just agree to disagree. To me, the question isn't, "Could LH 1973 have been greater?", as you put it; it's, "Could it have been good?". Maybe, but I can't see how it could ever have matched the original. Of course, we are to some extent comparing apples and oranges (again), since 1937 wasn't a musical and 1973 was, and, good, bad or indifferent, there are necessarily differences between them artistically and thematically anyway. And almost no remake ever matches, let alone surpasses, the original. To reiterate, I do not say that 1937 was "perfect"; far from it; many things could have been altered for the better, in my opinion (and I'm sure lovers of that film would take me to task for that statement); nor that Capra's direction was flawless, as I've cited several problems I've had with him. But the 1973 film, even with its inherent differences (i.e., music, updated to its era), just fails to generate the kind of romance (not "love" per se but adventure), mystery, character, mood, feel, all caught so well in the original. And I thought the music poor, certainly nowhere near equal to what such an undertaking required.

Like it or not, the 1937 film has, in virtually all critical and scholarly reviews, stood the test of time; it is today as it was 72 years ago -- a widely admired work, however time has changed a few perceptions about specifics in the plot or film itself. No one outside die-hard fans considers the 1973 film any kind of "classic", or even very good, and nowhere has there been a critical revision of this film upward in the 36 years since its premiere. You may disagree with such assessments but what cannot be disputed is the fact that the relative standing and critical opinion of each film remains essentially where it has been since each came out. For the 1937 film especially, to have remained so high in critical esteem after over seven decades is an achievement, as many films haven't fared as well.

Way above someplace I said a problem the '73 film had, through no fault of its own, was that the novel, and first film, were of a particular time and place -- the 30s -- that simply can't be directly transposed into a modern era. Changes in technology and society have rendered much of the book and first film obsolete in their depictions, and the basic story simply can't carry the credibility it did 70 years ago. That's one reason I think the '73 film would have been better -- probably not good, but better -- had it been set in the story's "proper" era, the 1930s. As a contemporary 70s piece, it just didn't work, aside from all its other shortcomings.

Well, we've discussed that, too. And probably everything else. It's been invigorating, anyway. Maybe we can find a film we basically agree on, and explore some interesting points there. It would sort of be like...well, like the toast near the film's end...like finding our own Shangri-la.