Lost Horizon

While evacuating a group of Western Europeans and North Americans from a flashpoint in the Chinese civil war, the plane of the designated British foreign secretary, writer Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), is hijacked and crashes in the Himalayas. The five survivors are led by the locals into the remote valley of Shangri-La, where they offer Colman the chance to lead a society that seems to live in total harmony. There is neither money, envy and greed, nor a police force or military. Friendliness, fraternity and goodness are lived values, the only law is to “be kind”. The humorous interludes in Frank Capra’s adaptation of James Hilton’s 1933 utopian novel of the same name are provided by Edward Everett Horton as paleontologist Alexander P. Lovett, who hopes to be ennobled after finding the lumbar vertebrae of a megatherium in Asia.