Lost Horizon

Lost Horizon (1937)

Timing: 2:12 (132 min)

7.025/10
200

All about film

Video 2

Photo 5

Actors and characters

Release date

1937-03-03

Country

United States

Production

Columbia Pictures

Genre

Adventure, Fantasy, Drama, Romance

Budget

$4 000 000

Revenue

$0

Website

Director

Frank Capra

Actors

Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, Edward Everett Horton, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Margo, Isabel Jewell, H.B. Warner, Sam Jaffe, John Burton
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Frank Capra

Operator

Joseph Walker

Composer

Dimitri Tiomkin

Artist

Audition

Editing

Gene Milford, Gene Havlick
All team (13)

• The film is based on the novel of the same name (1933) by James Hilton.
• The film exceeded its budget by more than $776,000 and did not recoup its investment for over 5 years. The resulting financial problems at Columbia Pictures disrupted Capra’s collaboration with studio head Harry Cohn and screenwriter Robert Riskin, with whom Capra had worked on many of his films.
• In 1942, the film was re-released as “The Lost Horizon of Shangri-La”. Robert Conway’s long, drunken speech, in which he criticized diplomatic games and war, was removed because studio executives feared that such sentiments, expressed during the height of World War II, would be unpopular with audiences. Capra felt the film made no sense without the scene and characterized the 12 minutes cut as “vital”.
• In 1952, a 92-minute version of the film was released, aiming to downplay the pro-communist sympathies discernible in the original and limit empathy towards China, with whom the American government's relations were becoming strained. The film was later lost, and in 1973, the American Film Institute began its restoration. The project was undertaken by UCLA Film & Television Archive in collaboration with Columbia Pictures and took 13 years. It was possible to restore all 132 minutes of the original soundtrack and 125 minutes of video. The missing seven minutes of video were replaced with a combination of photographs of the actors and scenes from the filming.