_Lost Horizon_ puts into the mouths of a British diplomat and a self-made Lama the humanistic hope that humanity can be perfected, indeed, will be perfected, by practicing good manners and patiently waiting for the alpha males to kill off each other. As the Lama puts it, "the Christian Ethic will then be realized, and the meek will inherit the Earth." He does not mean that Christianity is true, only that the teachings of Jesus, some of them, anyway, are cool. This was one of Hollywood's first forays into New Age propaganda, an uncritical mix of Eastern mysticism and Unitarian pacifism. Shangri-La reveals some beautiful Bauhaus architecture. I suppose, being filmed in 1937, it was intended to look futuristic and timeless. We are also presented with free love, easy divorce, and universal day care as important lanes of the highway to Utopia. If you watch this film, notice that the Lama evades and never answers Conway's question about what is to be done if life really is pointless. No one asks how one gets to live in the nice Bauhaus administration building (with imported furniture) instead of working in the valley below carrying water in buckets. As with most other Utopias presented in film and literature, this society has an unusual source of wealth that funds all this happiness. In Shangri-La, gold is laying around like so many rocks, which allows them to trade for upscale furniture with a caravan that comes by every few years. (In _Twenty-One Balloons_, Krakatoa has diamonds to support its economy. The Dem's Utopia would have "the rich" to support it. I wonder what happens after the rich get soaked -- but I digress.) The acting is not bad for a Capra film. Still, I guess _Lost Horizon_ gets high votes because that many viewers agree with its message. Yes, it would be a much better world if people were just nice. The question is how we can get people to be nice. Moore, Marx, Dewey, Hilton (the author of _Lost Horizon_), and Pol Pot have all tried to answer that question (respectively: communism, communism, socialism, just BE nice and let the not-nice people kill off each other, communism), but with poor results. Being nice is a good idea. Relationships are everything--living in communion with God and with one's neighbors is the meaning of life. However, there will always be plenty of not-nice people, no matter how nice other people are to them. _Lost Horizon_ belongs in the Museum of Yesterday's Tomorrows. It's a good way to peek at what intellectuals were presenting as the answer to the world's problems in 1937. The seventy years since then have shown some of the results, but, unfortunately, the learning curve among the cultural leadership seems to be relatively flat. I give LH a 5 mainly for its interest as a cultural artifact. As entertainment, it is pretty boring.
Review of Lost Horizon
