George Conway really was right
When I first watched LOST HORIZON (1973), Conway's younger brother, the jet-setting photographer, George (Michael York), seemed to be a selfish, spoil-sport, who may have metaphysically represented the bad side of humanity, that which values competition, ambition, and material wealth above others.
But when you watch the movie as an older adult, with your own career behind you and many years of adult life experience, you realize that George Conway was not a bad man. In fact, he was a nice guy. There was nothing morally wrong with his choice of career and lifestyle. Many people thrive on action and excitement and life lived vicariously on adventure and risk. George was a young man who lived life to its fullest in his own way, as a freelance photographer who traveled the world. It's no wonder he found Shangri-La NOT liberating as his companions, but CONSTRAINING.
In retrospect, I wonder how many of us would have been delighted to experience a month or so in Shangri-La, but then start climbing the walls afterwards. The movie's message was lost on its critics who savaged the movie; the message of humanity, compassion, humility, cooperation, honesty, lack of deceit; the value of love of friends and lovers over the value of material wealth and social position. Maybe humanity is not evolved to exist in such a Shangri-La until the afterlife, but it shows us what humanity should always strive to achieve as intrinsic to its own evolution.
George Conway was perfectly within his purview to accept or reject a life in Shangri-La. No one was supposed to be there against there will. But the movie took a dark turn when it becomes evident that immortality and youth were illusions. This was the spiritual letdown of Shangri-La. Shangri-La is a metaphor for Heaven and God and nothing that God gifts to us comes with strings or givebacks. In other words, inhabitants of Shangri-La should have been free to leave anytime without aging to their true chronological age. Once leaving Shangri-La, they might commence aging naturally, but to suddenly age to true chronological years and die reflects badly on Shangri-La as not truly authentic. In this perspective you must accept that George Conway may have considered Shangri-La an illusion, pleasant as it seemed, but a trap, nonetheless, that should be left as soon as possible.
In retrospect, decades later, I have come to the view that George Conway, far from being the nominal or token 'bad guy' in the movie, put there to induce tension and friction, was actually the smartest one in the bunch that realized Shangri-La was actually a grand illusion of peace and tranquility, a golden cage or a grand retirement home where people retired to much too early in their lives. Shangri-La was ultimately false because once you physically departed Shangri-La, you lost your youth and died if you were too old. If Shangri-La was true to its beauty, the gift of enduring life and youth (depending upon how old you were when you entered) would be permanent, not transitory if you left.