When you think about it a little bit, the philosophy of better living in Shangri-La is naive and insulting. The whole idea that just being nice to each other will solve everyone's problems is a little ridiculous. Even when Capra's version came out, the world was a very complicated place, naive sentiments rarely help solve the world's problems. The valley ruled over by the grand lama of Shanrgi-La is really a dictatorship run by a religious elite, hardly the Disneyland the film is trying to sell to the audience.
But, getting back to the film. Lost Horizon probably had a fighting chance as a remake, but the songs really killed it. Burt Bacharach and Hal David really outdid themselves with one horrible song after the other. Apparently no one bothered to actually listen to the score before they filmed their songs.
Finch and Ullmann's singing voices were dubbed for their duets and soliloquy's. You think Liv Ullmann in particular would have been about the last person to show up in a musical especially after her performance in Face to Face, but there she is merrily skipping and singing with her little Asian school children to the song "The World Is A Circle," it's almost as disturbing as watching her performance as the creepy mute in Persona.
A sign that the film was probably destined for trouble was the producer Ross Hunter's brilliant idea to reuse the castle set from that other musical disaster Camelot as the monastery Shangri-La, that should have been a big omen.
150 minutes, written by Larry Kramer.
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