Did I mention that the movies I'm watching this series are in chronological order?
I just looked back, and oh yes, I did.
That means starting with a film that is so old, some of its scenes are missing.
It's a phenomenon I first encountered when I was watching Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), a film that worked for me so much that it is now in my top 100 on Flickchart, but a film that had some portion of it lost to time. In order to fill this missing space in the narrative -- a narrative that was still four hours long, mind you -- production stills from those scenes were included. At first it's a bit weird, but once you're used to it, it adds an additional depth of historicity.
It was funny to find the same thing in a film from 13 years later, and from director Frank Capra no less. I thought by 1937, the preservation of film had reached such a point that significant films were rarely, if ever, lost, in whole or in part.
It's only seven minutes worth of Lost Horizon, the Academy Award winner for best editing (as is every film in this series), that had to be recreated in this way, while the complete soundtrack played behind them. But I thought it was noteworthy that an Academy Award winner -- which won an award for its editing, no less -- would be chopped up in this fashion.
Not as noteworthy, though, as it was to finally understand the origins of a term I have heard many times in culture but never fully understood.
That term is Shangri-La, and I know in the abstract that it refers to a remote paradise, a Brigadoon of sorts. (I haven't actually consumed any of the culture related to Brigadoon either.) I haven't ever known, though, where that term came from. As it turns out, it came from this movie, or from the book on which the movie is based. Which means I should be more familiar with Lost Horizon than its rather generic title has made me familiar with it to this point.
Shangri-La is the name given to a city hidden in a valley of the Himalayas, which is almost impossible to reach due to the nearly impassable mountains around it. And once you get there, you don't want to leave. Inexplicably, the city is teeming with all the resources its population needs to survive. And while some of those things are grown naturally, it seems hard to believe that the others can be explained exclusively because they were brought in by porters, including all the materials for the ornate buildings and other architecture in the city. Not only does everyone seem incredibly happy, but their aging has been slowed down almost to a halt, such that an average person can live hundreds of years without showing signs of getting significantly older until the very end.
Our crew of five main characters -- four men and a woman -- get here because they are British citizens piloted out of a Chinese city that is succumbing to rebellion. The plane is hijacked, something they don't realize until they've been flying all night and are in a different direction from where they thought they should be. The plane runs out of fuel and crashes, killing only the pilot, while the remainder are picked up by a group of envoys from the city. Many of them resist at first the strange change in their circumstances, but before long, all but one are fully under the spell of Shangri-La. Whether or not it is a benevolent spell is another matter.
My point today is to talk about editing, which is why I haven't bothered to name the actors or to go into any great detail about the ins and outs of the plot.
And right off the bat, I noticed some things that I thought might be qualifying for an Oscar, as well as those that might be disqualifying.
The opening scene of the evacuation from the city that's being overthrown is just the type of sequence that would have gotten other editors talking back in 1937. As the crowds burst and flow toward the landing strip where the plane is trying to take off, there's a great momentum to their movements that benefits from the way editors Gene Havlick and Gene Milford (can't be a piece about editing without mentioning the names of the editors) have sown together the available footage. Not only do we get the sense of the movement, as a physical spectacle, but we feel the contagious stress of the people on the ground there. Good editing should likely have an emotional impact on you as you're watching, if it's this sort of scene.
I also thought the crash sequence was good in that regard, cutting back and forth between the plane on its descent and the faces of the people inside the plane, fearing the worst. I'm not saying that would be considered groundbreaking in 2025, but for 1937, I suspect it was a fairly clever way of showing their distress intercut with exactly the thing they had to be distressed about.
A later scene of a ceremonial gathering in Shangri-La, involving torches and processions, was also notable for how the two Genes have edited the footage into a rhythm with the music. Finally, there is an avalanche near the end that calls for a similar superlative use of the craft to achieve its impact.
Interestingly, though, I found that outside of these albeit four strong sequences, the editing was average to poor, at least by today's standards.
One thing that irked me, that I doubt was as much of an issue back then because it had not yet been acknowledged, was how many shots vary very little from the one before. Nowadays we know that if you are using two consecutive shots on the same scene, you have to gives us a different angle in each shot, preferably a very different angle, to give the scene a cohesiveness. (Without breaking the 180-degree rule, of course.) You barely ever seen two consecutive shots that are essentially the same angle, varied only very slightly, or with only a very slight difference in the depth of field. Or if you do, you immediately write the film off as poorly edited.
Again, this might not have been an acknowledged part of the craft back then. But looking at it with 2025 eyes, I noticed it every time -- all the more so for the fact that I was watching the film specifically to appreciate its editing choices. I think I expected either good or neutral/functional editing, not editing that I actually considered bad. And then when I saw it once, I immediately noticed it every other time it occurred, which was at least a half-dozen times.
Of course, I will grant Lost Horizon a pass here. And in fact, it's gratifying to see this as it will help me chart the evolution of the craft from these beginnings. I suspect I will not see this sort of faux pas, which likely was not even a faux pas back then, again in this series.
Which continues in February just a year later with Michael Curtiz' and William Keighley's The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I loved the one time I saw it.
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