Escapism, Old and New
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen ESCAPISM, OLD AND NEW BY JOHN SIMON Well now, good people, what is your candidate for the worst picture of the last year or two? I limit the time range, for there is no point in...
...Burt Bacharach's tunes and orchestrations...
...Women, by the way, exhibit no flesh, however warm it may get...
...Everything about this Shangri-La looks like a set...
...I hasten to add, are every bit as vulgar as Hal David's lyrics...
...Hunter, I agree for once with Judith Crist, is perhaps the only man around who would remake a 1937 movie into a 1932 one...
...At least, they are described as "the men of Shangri-La," though they appear to have been hand-picked for purposes of population control...
...the rest of the time, they are isolated from everyone, and all the megalopolitan vastnesses are emptied out for them to cavort in...
...the correct equivalent for 1973 is not to turn James Hilton's Shangri-La into the Shangri-La Hilton, but to cough up something like Godspell, but let's not anticipate...
...Two of the actors, Victor Garber and Robin Lamont, have some winning moments...
...It was theater of the kind that shows how much can be done with a few simple props and costumes and a lot of bright ideas, and it seemed as legitimate for Tebelak and Schwartz to translate Matthew into hippie, flower-child terms as it was for Pasolini to translate him into neo-realism of the La Terra Trema kind...
...The picture clearly should be called Shangri-La Melody or Lullaby of Shangri-La, and when you consider that it cost $6 million to produce and makes The Sound of Music look like La Regie du jeu, you will have to admit that never was tackiness purchased at a greater cost...
...I must ask you also to restrict yourselves to so-called A-pictures, since there is no need to swat obscure, almost invisible flies...
...But the show was a reduction, and to film it against a background of New York City with locations especially chosen for their height, breadth or length, accentuated by extreme long shots and zooms, is to run counter to its spirit...
...You might nominate Portnoy's Complaint or Play It as It Lays, Fellini's Roma or Pope Joan, Alex in Wonderland or The Spider's Stratagem, or any number of other excellent choices...
...and, truly, the lemons he has been producing do not even have the juice of life...
...Moreover, the children of the elect would have to leave the tiny paradise and, presumably, form another mutually destructive race in a less miraculous climate...
...Godspell, which may never have had God, has now lost even its spell...
...His favorite boasts are that he does not allow sex, nudity or four-letter words in his movies, and that he gives the public what it wants...
...Even the average American might catch this fatal glimpse of truth: The earthly paradise is no longer paradise when the many invade it...
...Since the one law that governs Shangri-La is "Be kind...
...It retold the Gospel According to Matthew in terms of a combination gospel, clown and minstrel show, and the improvisatory, collegiate quality, playful and tuneful, was controlled by wit and delivered with fervor...
...They have become segregated and extraneous...
...The contraries collide and shatter, and the film falls apart...
...the tunes are less ingratiating, the words ring hollow, and the kids are less likable when obliged to sustain winsomeness through enormous, long-held closeups...
...Suddenly we get police cars with searchlights that seem to induce the Crucifixion...
...The solitary honest moment in Lost Horizon occurs when Peter Finch as Conway, the idealistic hero, remarks to his Shangri-La schoolmarm-sweetheart, Liv Ull-mann, "I am certain there is a wish for Shangri-La in every man's heart," that all good people "secretly wish they were in a beautiful place like this...
...For to be able to elicit a nonperformance from an actress as good as Liv Ullmann—worse yet, to make her look totally unattractive—is a spectacular achievement all right...
...If only the Oscars had such a category, a little honesty could be infused into the proceedings...
...To be sure, everyone in the movie manages to look silly, although John Gielgud succeeds in making Chang, the Oxford-educated Assistant High Lama, amusing in a campy way...
...In fact, Godspell and its flower children may no longer be sufficiently up-to-date escapism now that the hippie myth has exploded, the road to Woodstock having become the road to Altamont...
...Charles Jarrott, the director, has already given us two paltry historical spectaculars, Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots...
...One of Hunter's earlier films, incidentally...
...It was youthful and frisky and seemed to combine theatrical canniness with existential innocence...
...and "Have I found Shangri-La/Or has it found me...
...Are they holier than it, or just less real...
...This drivel—including the subliterate tautology of "emotional feelings"—was concocted by Larry Kramer, who wrote the screenplay for Women in Love, which might cause admirers of that movie to ask themselves some belated questions...
...Even Utopian thinking nowadays realizes that it cannot lead people to an outside paradise...
...and Peter Finch knows how to look intelligent even while forced to sing (or to have someone's voice sing through his face) such stuff as "Will I find/There is really such a thing/ As peace of mind...
...he now proves equally gifted with the ahistoric spectacular...
...The John-Michael Tebelak-Stephen Schwartz musical on which it is based was small, unassuming and charming...
...there is suddenly a world of Pigs, of Others, beyond that of the 10 clowns...
...On stage, these 10 young people became the world, multum in parvo...
...was a remake of Imitation of Life, an imitation of an Imitation...
...and so, perhaps, they were until the set decorator, director and cinematographer got through with them, by which time they looked like perfect imitations...
...The script sinks to the illiteracy of "When you lay down to sleep," and has poor Finch say "I am desperately trying to keep my emotional feelings and my spiritual needs from clobbering each other to death...
...both the good and the bad was embodied in them...
...The stage show was conceived and executed by a group of drama students at Carnegie-Mellon University and reached Off-Broadway more or less unchanged...
...Escapism of a more contemporary sort is provided by Godspell...
...The story itself—one of genteel escapism from a Hitler-threatened world—was appropriate trash for 1937...
...One feels surrounded by idiocy and the crassest fakery—transported, in fact, into the heart of Nixon's America...
...That may indeed be so, but I am more convinced that he gives them what he wants, and honest-to-goodness sex and a little racy talk would be much too real for him...
...Well, if they were," she replies, "it wouldn't be beautiful for long...
...The current escapism is inward rather than outward...
...But something ugly creeps in now...
...even the books in that library (designed, it seems, more for dancing than for reading) are all leather-bound sets—only authors of Collected or Complete Works are chosen by the lamasery (lamaserialized...
...There are a few bravura passages, such as the softshoe routine in front of the Accutron sign in Times Square, with time visibly flitting away under the dancers' feet while, behind and above them, their enlarged shadows duplicate their routine in lights...
...I hear that he collects glass and ceramic lemons...
...There are other changes, too: Half the original cast is missing from the movie, and substitutes like Merrell Jackson are unfortunate...
...it must create paradise inside man, here and everywhere...
...and the clothes, like the furnishings, are stunningly garish...
...I limit the time range, for there is no point in overcomplicating what is already a tough question...
...Its one library consists of books that are manifestly not read by anyone...
...there is an obvious class system but no technology, obliging women to carry water on their backs...
...Everything becomes too big, even the orchestration and amplification of sounds...
...there is, clearly, no need for science, art or good taste in the place...
...men, however, are re-vealingly stripped for a scarf dance ludicrously choreographed by Hermes Pan...
...It was they who followed Jesus, and they who crucified him...
...Ross Hunter has declared that all the flowers in the film were real...
...The basic absurdity of Hilton's novel is that if humanity outside the ring of magic mountains were to destroy itself, the blessed valley would surely not be large enough to contain all the righteous...
...Not only are Hunter's films synthetic, so, too, are his name (really Martin Fuss), his hair, and, as far as I could glean from one conversation, his mind...
...The only question I ask is: Will Lost Horizon be a financial success...
...They will be clobbered to insensibility not only by emotional feelings and spiritual needs, but also by mental vacuity...
...But you will sweep them all away before a contender that must have arrived in garbage rather than film cans, Ross Hunter's musicalized Lost Horizon...
...David Greene's direction and Richard G. Heimann's camera work are spotty...
...What is their connection to that world...
...This creates a double movement in opposite directions, a simultaneous reduction and magnification...
...the film, bloated, pretentious and self-contradictory, is deeply unpleasant...
...If so, there may be some hope for the American movie industry, but none whatever for American moviegoers...
...wherever hordes come hurtling toward Shangri-La, Shangri-La is defiled, devaluated and ceases to be...
...Part of the time you see the city and its crowds in their greatest amplitude, with the 10 performers as part of that mass...
...This regrettably eliminates movies like A Place Called Today, the one film I know of that used the same man as cinematographer and composer...
...What this movie offers looks like a composite of various old, exotic Hollywood sets and a number of the more pretentious Bel Air interiors...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 8
