Lost Horizon (1973).

Review #1601: Lost Horizon.

Cast: 

Peter Finch (Richard Conway), Liv Ullmann (Catherine), Sally Kellerman (Sally Hughes), George Kennedy (Sam Cornelius), Michael York (George Conway), Olivia Hussey (Maria), Bobby Van (Harry Lovett), James Shigeta (Brother To-Lenn), Charles Boyer (the High Lama), John Gielgud (Chang), and Kent Smith (Bill Fergunson) Directed by Charles Jarrott.

Review: 

"A picture of hope, of faith with a spiritual quality. We all need that with the pressures of the world... Everyone's looking for a place that has peace and security."

Sometimes one does not know where to start and stop in their pursuit of a movie Shangri-La. The 1933 novel by James Hilton (who had eight of his works turned into films), had been adapted into a film previously by Frank Capra in 1937. While it was generally received well at the time, it did not recover its $2 million budget for a few years. Incidentally, the same year that this film was released, the 1937 film was first being restored by the American Film Institute. The funny thing is that there is so many hands here known for better things. We have past and future Academy Award winners with Kennedy, Finch, and Gielgud. We have a B-movie actor-turned-dialogue director-turned producer in Ross Hunter that was known for films like Pillow Talk (1959), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), and Airport (1970). We have a director in Jarrot that received a fair bit of notice with Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1971). Composer Burt Bacharach and Hal David were a classic partnership in contributing songs together. And then...Hunter never produced another theatrical film after this, while Bacharach and David never worked together again. At least writer Larry Kramer (writer for Women in Love (1969)) came out of the affair well, in the sense that the money for doing it helped keep afloat for several years (he would become a playwright the year this film was released along with activism in the gay community alongside AIDS awareness).

An adventure can be tough at 150 minutes, but this is a musical fantasy adventure, which means one is in for incredible pain if it is done terribly. Would you be surprised to hear that this did not prove well with audiences? Bette Midler called it "Lost Her-Reason", and there isn't much in the film to argue against that. For the first thirty (or so) minutes, one is seeing a straight-laced adventure, as it has to set up its trappings and characters with clichés-I mean personality with flaws to inevitably confront later on. In that sense, it probably could have been an interesting adventure film that could have updated itself with finding a place of inner peace with the secrets that lurk within. And then Gielgud shows up, fur costume and all, to help usher them into their strange little utopia, complete with a re-used set (castle) from Camelot (1967). There might be a chance at a scene involving characters having a conversation, whether that involves a thought process over meeting the Lama or just about why it may be futile to think about smuggling gold out of paradise. Of course that can't happen, because it is a musical of the worst kind: one that doesn't know when to shut up. Simply put, the songs aren't too particularly interesting, the music to go alongside it is too sickeningly sweet to go alongside the fact that only three actors actually sung their lines (Kellerman, Shigmata, and Van). Of all the things to make a musical, why would you take an adventure like this and make a musical of it? The funny thing is that this was already tried: In 1956, the book was turned into a musical in Shangri-La (with Hilton credited for co-contribution to the book and lyrics), where it promptly ran for 21 performances on Broadway. The film was the last of a line of musicals that received a roadshow release, done after the boom of films like Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and so on (Pete's Dragon (1977) was evidently the last one to have such release).

I hope Finch (noted for films like A Town Like Alice (1956) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)) liked what he saw from being the head of a dignified mess. After all, most of his "songs" are through internal monologue, for which he isn't singing them, but that's...better than the others? Worse? It is wooden all the way, but that is technically better than the star-studded clunkers following him. Ullmann (famous for a variety of roles, mostly with director Ingmar Bergman) acts in theory with the idea of sweet charm, dancing her way through dubbed songs with stiffness expected from casting non-musical actors for a musical. Now, now, Kellerman did in fact do her own singing and dancing, but that doesn't exactly leave her with more dignity in a Saturday school special type of acting fit for such a silly character, one that looks like she wants to be anywhere else but here. Kennedy is just as baffling, because one would almost think they should have tried for camp, but yet here we are with strange choices all the way through. York plays the strangest character present in both book and film: the skeptic, which he doesn't do well with in the least, probably because however legitimate his concerns with an obvious utopia are, he can't really do much with actually carrying this to anything worthwhile - besides, he is meant to be the brother of Finch's character, and the age difference between them is 26 years (!) - they might as well have been playing father-and-son. Hussey (most famous from Romeo and Juliet (1968), a film long sought to cover) falls to the wayside in silliness, mostly because one is more curious to see how the effect will go when the secretly elder one will age outside of the mountain...it ultimately reminds me of a peanut, which is pretty amusing. At least Van, a musical actor known for productions like No, No, Nanette and others for two decades, is somewhat right for what is needed in comic relief and singing, although one almost wonders if he would've been better as the lead somehow. Shigeta (who also did his singing like Kellerman and Van as a pioneer for leads for Asian Americans alongside TV and singing) seems sorely lacking, one who needs more to do than to just help shepherd these bread-like personalities through utopia silliness. This was the third-to-last role for Boyer, acting in a chair to some effect for like five minutes in a film that seems to have not updated itself one bit from films of Boyer's era. Gielgud later described his role as an "idiotic walkabout", one that seemed to not let him really act alongside noting his slight shame in taking the film to help in money problems. Being wrapped in a warm fur costume and a dubious script without having to sing and get paid for it? Sure, why not. There are technically highlights, in picking out the silly moments besides the hokum that comes through with such pallid singing, but my favorite is near the end, where Finch and York are travelling slowly away down the mountain, trying to keep up with the guides and they yell at them to slow down...which promptly leads to an avalanche occurring over the guides. The other little nugget comes from when Finch tries to go back in the end, and a brief song happens after he apparently reaches it - I just like to pretend he actually just when snow-blind again. On the whole, there is very little to like from a film that deserves all of its notations of turkey classification in how silly it all proves to be within an intolerable 150 minute run-time, ineffective execution of songs and dance, and its lack of anything meaningful to make a worthwhile adventure in utopia that merits needing more than one adaptation of the original material by Hilton. In short, it sucks.

Happy Thanksgiving. Next Time: Thirsty for more? It's time for Hobgoblins.

Overall, I give it 3 out of 10 stars.

Hour of the Wolf.

Review #1427: Hour of the Wolf.

Cast: 
Max von Sydow (Johan Borg), Liv Ullmann (Alma Borg), Gertrud Fridh (Corinne von Merkens), Georg Rydeberg (Lindhorst), Erland Josephson (Baron von Merkens), Naima Wifstrand (Old Lady with Hat), Ulf Johansson (Heerbrand), Gudrun Brost (Gamla Fru von Merkens), and Ingrid Thulin (Veronica Vogler) Written and Directed by Ingmar Bergman (#777 - The Seventh Seal)

Review: 
"I think we are the sum of what we have read, seen and experienced. I do not think artists are born from emptiness! I am a small stone of a tall building, I depend on each element of the building, next to, above, below."

It never hurts to reach for someone who wants to question the human condition with films. Ingmar Bergman was most certainly a director with enough ambition and detail to accomplish films that have lingered as iconic for Swedish cinema. He had a troubled childhood under strict parenting and unhappy school years, but he developed an interest in the theater and film from an early age, most notably when he acquired a magic lantern (an early type of image projector). Studies in university were mostly dominated by theater and film-watching, and he eventually found himself rewriting scripts for film that led to his true screenwriting debut with Torment (1944) and his eventual directorial debut with Crisis (1946). Bergman felt that art had to expose humiliation and how we as beings do it to each other, since it is "one of the most dreadful companions of humanity, and our whole social system is based to an extent on humiliation." Over the course of nearly sixty years, Bergman would work on numerous films (with all but the last four being for television) that have received notice (from directors past and present to winning three Academy Awards for Best International Film), ranging from Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), and Fanny and Alexander (1982).

The original script (known as "The Cannibals") had been done in 1964, but he later revised the script after a bout of pneumonia made him think of the budget it would take to execute it. Instead, he did the film Persona (1966), but he eventually re-worked the script, which would take inspiration from works such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute (which Bergman would later adapt into a film in the following decade) alongside Bergman's own nightmares. It is a film that threatens to unravel before one's very own eyes in self-destruction for the artist and in a way the audience. How long can it be before one's creativity starts to turn into madness, particularly if one can't sleep (as is the case for night owls like myself). It is a Gothic nightmare that accomplishes a good deal of what it wants to do in Bergman's own manner that segues into psychological horror. Whether it is reaches you on a level that inspires chills is up to how much patience one has with its moments into surreal territory that seems at times like a retelling of the vampire legend (Bergman was an admirer of Dracula (1931), incidentally). If one is looking for a straight story in 88 minutes, this may not be the one for you. If viewed on its own terms as something to pick apart like a surgeon on the table or an artist looking upon what they have created and having it look back on them, then this works itself out quite nicely. In terms of acting, von Sydow and Ullmann make up our primary focus for the film and each do fine with what they are given, since both each worked with Bergman ten times (this, along with Shame (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969) are argued by some to be a trilogy involving violence upon ordinary lives and guilt). One shouldn't be surprised to hear this about von Sydow, who was quite versatile in playing heroes and villains in both European and American cinema in over seven decades of work. In this, he makes quite a contemplative focus in terms of a tortured artist, one with plenty of brooding conviction in his dealing with the real and unreal involving demons and insomnia. Ullmann, the Norwegian actress of international fare and along with eventual director of her own films, accompanies our focus as the other side of the coin with von Sydow in her own type of despair and struggle in trying to keep herself intact from falling off the edge, beginning and ending the film with poignancy. The others do fine in accompanying the quiet terror that builds in garnering curiosity in a subtle haunt. The sequence involving von Sydow and a kid, a involving overexposed photography is likely the most memorable part, at least if one isn't going with just images, which could involve a ceiling or a sequence with a little person in the closet. On the whole, this is a film with plenty of despair as a sketch upon the things that haunt us in and out of our dreams when it comes to creativity and the encompassing companionship that one tries to seek out (or vice versa) to alleviate the creature that lurks in the dark of humiliation in the hour of birth and death. It may require a bit of patience to push it forward, but it is generally a fair piece by Bergman with enough curiosity factor to make it a good sell for world cinema to view at least once.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.