Lost Horizon

It took British author James Hilton six weeks to write his visionary novel Lost Horizon. It took director Frank Capra two years-and half of his home studio Columbia's annual budget-to bring it to the screen. After a lengthy preamble, inviting audiences to imagine their own ideas of Utopia, the film ...more

Frank Capra's Lost Horizon belongs to a genre that reached its heyday in the 1930s: the philosophical drama. Usually based on plays, films such as Street Scene, Death Takes A Holiday, On Borrowed Time and The Petrified Forest dealt with driving issues of the day and embraced weighty questions of life and death. Adapted from the novel by James Hilton, Lost Horizon proved more popular and enduring than any of them, principally because the filmmaker pulled out all the stops in translating the ...more