Lost Horizon (1937) on Netflix

Approved19372h 12mAdventure Drama Fantasy

British diplomat Robert Conway, his brother George and three other evacuees take the last plane out of Baskul. Hijacked, it crashes in the Himalayas, and the survivors are led to Shangri-La.

Netflix3.6/5
IMDb7.6/1015,883 votes
Rotten Tomatoes92%

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Plot summary

In March 1935, the writer, soldier and diplomat Robert Conway is flying Westerners out of Baskul, a city in western China, during a revolutionary uprising, and he is due to return home to become Foreign Secretary. He boards the last plane out with his brother George and three other evacuees: paleontologist Alexander Lovett, swindler Henry Barnard and the terminally ill Gloria Stone. A new pilot takes the controls, the aircraft is hijacked and it runs out of fuel over Tibet, crashing in the Himalayas. Chang and his men find the survivors and bring them to Shangri-La, a valley hidden in the mountains, whose inhabitants answer to the mysterious High Lama. Most newcomers come to like the place, and Conway is drawn to Sondra, a French teacher raised in the valley, while his brother George and Maria want to leave.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lost Horizon (1937)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

After a screen test of 56-year-old retired stage actor A. E. Anson, Capra decided he was just right for the part and called the actor's home, telling the housekeeper who answered to relay the message that the part was his. Soon after, the housekeeper called back to say that when Anson heard the news, he had a heart attack and died.
Capra's first cut of the film was six hours long, and the studio considered releasing it in two parts before deciding the idea was impractical. Trimmed for a first preview in Santa Barbara on November 22, 1936, it followed a showing of the screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild: many walked out, and those who remained laughed at sequences intended to be serious.
The production ran more than $776,000 over budget and did not earn its cost back for five years, a financial crisis serious enough that it damaged director Frank Capra's working relationship with studio head Harry Cohn and his personal friendship with screenwriter Robert Riskin.
The studio head cut an additional 14 minutes, to 118 minutes, before the film went into general release. Capra sued Columbia over the cuts made without his approval and its refusal to pay him a $100,000 semi-annual salary payment; a settlement in November 1937 gave him the money and relieved him of one of the five films his contract required.
In 1973 the AFI initiated a restoration, undertaken by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Columbia Pictures, that took 13 years to complete. All 132 minutes of the original soundtrack were recovered, but only 125 minutes of film could be found, so the missing seven minutes were replaced with publicity photos of the actors in costume and still frames.
To shoot the film's snow and aircraft-interior scenes, the crew worked inside the Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage Warehouse, where the cold temperatures damaged equipment and caused delays, while the Shangri-La sets were built next to the busy Hollywood Way and had to be filmed only at night to avoid daytime traffic.
Capra next offered the part to 58-year-old Henry B. Walthall, who died before shooting began, so to play it safer age-wise he finally cast Sam Jaffe, who was just 45. Camera logs dating back to the production dispute the earlier story, indicating that Anson never tested for the part.