You wouldn’t want to spend all that money and miss the worst single piece of choreography you’ve ever seen in your life. I mention this particular number because, if you go to the movie, I want you to look out for it. Meanwhile, several other young men twirl orange scarves. A young man (symbolic of a young man) and a young woman (symbolic of a young woman) solemnly hand a baby back and forth in order to symbolize how neither one holds the baby all the time. There’s one production number, for example, in which the people of Shangri-la celebrate the solidarity of the family. Just a nice, quiet new version of the good old story would have been enough, The material is so slight it can hardly bear the weight of music, and it sinks altogether during a series of the most incompetent and clumsy dance numbers I’ve ever seen. What I don’t understand is why the remake had to be a musical in the first place. For example, the prostitute in the 1937 movie has now become a Newsweek correspondent. The movie more or less follows the earlier version, with a few twists. There they discover a civilization where nobody ever gets tired, nobody ever grows old, there’s gold in every stream and the coolies have not yet been organized by Cesar Chavez. I mean, how seriously can you take this stuff? The story involves a group of political and social refugees whose airplane is mysteriously hijacked and taken to Shangri-La. The movie is a remake of the 1937 Ronald Colman classic, which was fun because it maintained its sense of humor. About two hours into the movie, Bobby Van has a birthday party and they sing “Happy Birthday” to him. Not that the movie would have been better if the music were better no, the movie is awful on its own. I don’t know how much Ross Hunter paid Burt Bacharach and Hal David to write the music for “Lost Horizon,” but whatever it was, it was too much.
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