A pair of titles came from Australia today, one of which is a new addition — Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe” — and the other is a restock, Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon.”
Having lifted Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures out of poverty row, Frank Capra made a bid for prestige with 1933’s “The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” the story of an American missionary in China (played by Barbara Stanwyck, in the fourth of four Capra films she made between 1930-33). Despite the distinction of being the first film to play Radio City Music Hall it proved a financial flop, and Capra’s quest for Oscar gold would have to wait until “It Happened One Night” swept the Academy Awards two years later.
Undeterred, Capra returned to China as the setting of 1937’s “Lost Horizon,” but like his earlier Chinese effort it was a star-crossed enterprise. After a 3 1/2 hour cut of the film suffered a disastrous test screening, Cohn seized the picture and cut it down to two hours and twelve minutes. In the decades to come the film would be further whittled down, first playing up China’s conflict with Japan during the film’s introductory text and having footage that seemed too pacifist excised at a time when the world was gearing up for World War II, then having the film’s utopian aspects toned down during the hysteria of the 1950’s Red Scare. It was only after the American Film Institute, UCLA, and Sony began the long, slow process of restoring the film that “Lost Horizon” was brought back to something resembling what moviegoers saw at the time of its release. Alas, although the film’s entire soundtrack has been recovered, there are still six minutes (out of 132) that remain lost to the ravages of time, represented here by production stills.