Over the Rainbow

By JAY COCKS

LOST HORIZON

Directed by CHARLES JARROTT

Screenplay by LARRY KRAMER

There is smog in Shangri-La. Stashed on the shelf of the monastery library--that repository of wisdom and enlightenment for a weary world--is a Reader's Digest Condensed Book.

Signs of the times, and proof that things have changed since Frank Capra visited Novelist James Hilton's Oriental paradise in 1937. Pollution has socked in Burbank, where Producer Ross Hunter (Airport) built the monastery by redecorating a castle set that had been swallowing up space on the Warner Brothers back lot ever since Camelot. One sometimes wonders how the actors get through their Burt Bacharach-Hal David tunes--the contemporary equivalent, presumably, of the music of the spheres--without the aid of bottled oxygen.

As for that condensed book, whether it is a designer's prank or decorator's slip, it neatly symbolizes the transcendent banality that is shot through the movie like a dose of glucose. Kahlil Gibran would sound like Wittgenstein next to the woozy wisdom dispensed here: "You'd be surprised how a little courtesy all around makes the roughest problems so much smoother." "There are moments in every man's life when he glimpses the eternal." "We teach that virtue lies in moderation."

As in the original, Hero Hugh Conway (Peter Finch) is a sort of nonpartisan lobbyist for peace who is persuaded to abandon his political pursuits in the outside world and become the Grand Kleagle of Shangri-La. There he will receive the victims of international holocaust with warmth and tolerance. That the world will be consumed by greed and violence seems an odd notion for such a soggy fantasy to be advancing; that the solution to the problem is, forget it, fix it later, is not. What does it matter if the world blows up, after all, if we have the happy valley, Methuselah-like longevity, and Burt Bacharach and the Reader's Digest to teach us the better way?

Director Jarrott, a specialist in mummified "prestige" pictures like Mary, Queen of Scots, must have taken more than a casual look at Capra's original excursion. The opening of his version matches Capra practically scene for scene--and sometimes shot for shot. The choreography by Hermes Pan contains at least one number--a ballet by a herd of brawny natives swathed in salmon-colored loincloths and swirling matching scarves--that could stand (or leap) as a concise definition of contemporary camp.

The cast is large and largely helpless. Finch, a professional to the quick, has the decency not to look embarrassed, even when singing knock-kneed Bacharach-David soliloquies with lines like "Have I found Shangri-La/ Or has Shangri-La found me?" Liv Ullmann, practically impacted in makeup, smiles bravely; and there is a peppy song-and-dance number, kind of a Donald O'Connor comic turn, by Bobby Van, who is most engaging as a show-biz ham. Sally Kellerman plays a neurotic Newsweek correspondent. Also on hand are John Gielgud, George Kennedy, Michael York, Olivia Hussey, James Shigeta and, as the dying High Lama, Charles Boyer, of all people. It is a long way from the Casbah.

Fatuous and tasteless as Lost Horizon may be, it is at least without shame. Its vulgarity is all out front, which makes it preferable to such exercises in pretentiousness as Man of La Mancha and Fiddler on the Roof. That Lost Horizon and those high-minded embalming jobs represent the current parameters of the American movie musical, a form once so truly elegant, brassy and vital, is a matter for deep regret. . Jay Cocks

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