Travelogue

Out of This World (Theodore R. Kupferman) is compiled from Technicolor footage shot by Lowell Thomas Sr. and Jr. on the much-publicized trip the commentator and his son took to Tibet in 1949. It is a cinematic counterpart of the long evening with a photograph album. The pictures are often amateurishly taken, the continuity is rakishly discontinuous, and the narration is written and read like a fifth-grade paper on How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

What is left? A few hundred frames of calm beauty, a quiet memory of a sort of negative Eden, the last backward look into a primitive demi-paradise lost (little more than a year after these pictures were taken, Chinese Communist armies moved into Tibet). The camera sees the herds of yak grazing below icy peaks in meadows of wild orchids, and finds the barley harvests lying like some sort of killed light in the thin blue air. Wild flowers splurge --in summer the whole Himalaya seems a giant's rock garden. Down from the mountains to the high plateau: yak tents like black tarantulas on the golden plain; cold Mongol faces that, breaking suddenly into gentle smiles, seem like rocks come to life; skin coracles for crossing the rivers ; and never a wheel to be found except the prayer wheels spinning windily in the wayside shrines.

On to Lhasa with its gold-roofed Potala ("Palace of the Gods"), the Dalai Lama's magnificent winter residence. Lhasa itself at times looks less like a holy place than a sort of religious slum. The poorly clothed priests are herded in their hopelessly overcrowded cloisters (one of which has 10,000 inmates), and the camera in one distasteful sequence watches them being fed as cattle are, by the scoop. The scene enforces the impression of a country where --according to the Thomas' narration--so many men become priests that few are left to be fathers.

There are, however, some pleasanter pictures of the beings who dwell in this lost country. The Dalai Lama, aged 16 when this film was made, looks pretty much like any other teen-ager dressed up for a masquerade. The common people seem better than their betters. As they stir their hot-buttered tea or plow the skyey pastures with their dolorous yaks, or swarm to Lhasa for their pageants, their faces are warm with the comfortable joy of creatures at home in their world.

The last third of the film depicts the journey home, during which Lowell Sr. was thrown from a horse and broke his hip while only part way over the Hump to India. This part is a major bore. But the moviegoer who .manages to sit still to the end will be rewarded by another glimpse of the almost incredible Himalayan scenery in its opal mood.

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