Lost Horizon

Frank Capra, 1937 (8.2*)
Exotic, unspoiled locales around the world have always appealed to the more daring individuals of more populous regions, such as Europe; just look at the nationalities of all the famous explorers. In 1923, Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel was the first known westerner to enter the forbidden Tibetan city of Lhasa. She then published her accounts in her 1932 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet.

Shortly thereafter, novelist James Hilton wrote a short novel about a flight of western travelers that crashes in the Himilayas, and the survivors are rescued and taken to a fictitious hidden city in a mountain valley, called Shangri-La. Basically, this is a story of an exotic utopia untouched by civilization and the ills of modern society. The westerners are treated like welcome guests, and their’s is an adventure of a lifetime.

Frank Capra went out of character for this film of adventure and fantasy, starring Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, and Edward Everett Horton as the crash survivors, and Sam Jaffe miscast as a Tibetan spiritual master. It's contains none of Capra's homespun humor, nor is it a glimpse at classic Americana. A newer partially restored version has the entire soundtrack, but some scenes are filled in with only still images. It looks like the Hays Commission deleted scenes where people were simply talking, but within their bedrooms - innocent enough unless you're under the cloud of censorship.

The story may also be taken as a metaphor of a spiritual quest to find one’s center within, away from the distractions of the material world. Often we get a peek at this realm, and find it difficult to return due to life circumstances. Like the beautiful Australian film Walkabout, this utopia may exist in one’s past, and you can either remember it nostalgically, or make the physical effort to return to the same location where you once found bliss.

Since the late 1800’s, there have been many accounts by westerners of this little-explored region of earth and it’s philosophies, until during the 60’s it blossumed into an international cultural movement, generally called The New Age. The allure of the Himilayas and it’s mountain people have had a profound effect on western civilization, whether intentional or not. This story was an early entry that added fuel to that fire.

Nominated for 7 Academy Awards for 1937, including picture (a year when there were 10 nominations, the winner being The Life of Emile Zola), it won two, for film editing and art direction.

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The Awful Truth

Leo McCarey, 1937, bw (8.8*)
This is one of those 30’s screwball comedies that you can watch over and over. Cary Grant plays a man who may or may not have been philandering, as he’s getting a tan in a salon in the film’s beginning because he’s supposed to have been in Florida. When he gets home, wife Irene Dunne is gone, and the two start divorce proceedings.

They also start trying to make each other jealous by trying to get engaged as fast as possible. Of course, they then play little games trying to saboutage each other’s attempts at a new relationship. All this is made a classic with some very funny dialogue and performances to match. There’s a great sequence in which Dunne has someone play her husband sister for his new lady’s family.

Asta the dog, from the Thin Man series, has one of his 14 film roles here as Mr. Smith, the family pet for whom Grant demands visitation rights in the divorce proceedings - but is he missing the dog or Dunne?

Awful Truth is a film with genuine laughs, not one of those films that is pleasant throughout and a funny concept, but seemingly lacks any laugh-out-loud dialogue. McCarey had a hand in some of the best comedies of his era, notably the Marx Brothers’ best film, Duck Soup (1933)

McCarey actually won the Oscar® for best director for this film, which he later duplicated with Going My Way in 1945, for which he also won for best screenplay. This could have easily won for screenplay as well.

Ranked #515 in our update of the top ranked 1000 films of all-time
Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net

Ranked #84 comedy on our list of comedies in the top 100
Top Ranked Comedy Films of All Time

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

David Hand, supervising director (5 others credited as "sequence directors"), 1937 (8.7*)
Notably, the first full-length animated film, from Walt Disney Studio, features songs for kids like "Hi Ho, Hi Ho", without which the film would seem even longer than it does. Snow White is pursued by a queen jealous of her beauty, and she flees into the forest and discovers the house of the dwarfs while they are away at work and invites herself in. Of course, the dwarfs fall in love with her and want her to stay. She is later given a poisoned apple by the queen and falls into a sleep that only a prince can awaken with a kiss.

The best artwork was in the static backgrounds, in the style of the earlier Silly Symphonies cartoons from Disney Studios, probably the height of their talents (check out the Oscar®-winning Water Babies sometime to see what I mean), which provided an artistic setting for the simply animated characters to exist in. Here, the two styles blended together well, and became the Disney standard for a few decades, later copied by The Triplets of Belleville (2003), hand-drawn by Sylvain Chomet as a tribute to the early Disney style. animation

As innovative as this was, when it came out it only received special awards from the New York Film Critics, the Venice Film Festival, and an honorary Oscar®.

You know, as a kid, I always wondered about this film - I mean, a single babe of a young woman is suddenly living with seven adult dwarfs - it kinda makes you wonder.

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The Edge of the World

Michael Powell, 1937, bw (8.0*)
Filmed on one of Scotland's Shetland Islands, in a location so remote that the Roman Empire named one of the these islands the Latin for "edge of the world". This is a stark, beautifully shot black and white film whose style mirrors the harsh, simple, ascetic lifestyle of the people who inhabit the westernmost islands of the British Isles, beyond whose open sea lies "only America". Life is becoming increasingly harsh and unliveable for the fisherman of the island, due to overfishing from the bigger commercial fleets, and some nearby islands have had to be evacuated. The only current means of livelihood are wool and peat and there is little future for the island's youth, who are deserting for the towns and cities of the big islands.

Powell is perhaps less polished without his famous screenwriting partner Emeric Pressburger, (see The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) but this remains a very interesting early Powell effort. In fact, one might say the stark island landscapes only broken by people foreshadowed Antonioni's L'avventura over 20 years later. The dvd features a documentary by Powell shot when cast and crew revisited the island of Foula, location of the film's shooting, and revisited original inhabitants who were also in the film 25 years previously.

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Grand Illusion

aka La Grande Illusion
Jean Renoir, 1937, France, bw (8.9*)

I’ve often searched for the greatest classic French film, and I’ve often been disappointed, that is, until I saw Grand Illusion again for the first time in over 40 years. Most critics place Renoir’s Rules of the Game near the top of their lists (it’s #3 on the 1000 list, Illusion is #26, they are 1 and 10 for foreign language films), but like Roger Ebert, Rules of the Game I just don’t get, but I get Grand Illusion. This is probably the first great prisoner escape film, and along with All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the great anti-war films that preceded WWII.

This is a beautifully shot film about French prisoners during World War I being held by German officers in a tall, forbidding medieval castle. Career officers played by Erich von Stroheim, a German with a broken back now in a brace and relegated to prison warden duty, and a Frenchman played by Pierre Fresnay, are actually civil and gentlemanly toward each other, and symbolize the last of a dying breed of soldier: those born into families of career soldiers who continue the tradition. The others are common men, officers due to ability and necessity, and features Jean Gabin in his best role as a non-aristocratic everyman soldier, who, no matter how well treated they are, still plans an escape, as its their duty.

Without giving way too much, this has some eloquent statements about compassion, survival, heroism, and humanity in the midst of a brutal and senseless world war. The grand illusion, of course, is that war is not glory and bravery, but a useless waste of humankind, each one of which leaves behind a family and friends. There is one event between the two career officers that I did not understand, that didn’t seem true to their characters, and its an integral point in the plot so I can’t spoil it - that’s why this gets a 9 and not a 10. This was the first foreign language film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar®.

Note: I think I still prefer Jean de Florette/Manon des Source as my favorite French movie, although technically it's two separate films, but its both halves of one novel and really should be watched together.

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Captains Courageous

Victor Fleming, 1937, bw (8.1*)
Excellent early film adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling novel of a rich brat who falls overboard on an ocean liner headed for England, and is rescued by fisherman Spencer Tracy (who won an Oscar for Best Actor in spite of his awful Portuguese accent that Tracy later admitted was a Yiddish one he used on the stage). Child acting sensation and box office king Freddie Bartholomew is excellent as the spoiled kid who learns to both work and notice other people in the world while working with the fishermen. Freddie actually gets top billing over Tracy, ship's captain Lionel Barrymore, father Melvyn Douglas, and shipmate Mickey Rooney (thankfully sedated and without much dialogue). Barrymore (who detested child actors) said he could always work with Bartholomew because "he was never cute, he never acted like a child." Fleming later directed Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz.

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