Not only do I famously love great Hollywood musicals but I think it is true to say but I also have a perverse fondness for bad Hollywood musicals, many of which lurk in the back of my sometimes unexpectedly retentive brain to surface at odd moments. Last week for example, deciding that my granddaughter Dotty would be usefully entertained with a few light hearted youtube clips of lively, colourful, musical numbers, suddenly this song came to mind, and from thence, to the screen on my phone. Her nearly-two-year-old eyes might initially have shown some incredulity, but soon we were jigging and rocking to its silliness. O how we danced.
‘Lost Horizon’ was not John Gielgud’s finest moment, but there you go, just goes to show all those luvvies are in it for the money. The musical version is an adaptation of an earlier Hollywood film, from a book presumably about some people whose plane crashes and discover Shangri La out there in the Himalayas or Nepal or vague oriental-land. The musical adaptation is clumsy to say the least, not just because the first half an hour tries to stay true to the drama of the original flight. Which doesn’t fit well with a film of jolly show tunes and technicolour escapism. I saw this film in the Maxime Cinema, Blackwoood, when it was first released. Who did I go with? (Was it you, Barrie and Jan?) We probably chuckled quite a bit. Still, even then I had some respect, I think, for Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s ability to craft a catchy song, and although I didn’t think it would win any prizes, this one was probably the catchiest of the bunch.
If you want to see a really clumsy clip from the film, see what they do with ‘Living Together, Growing Together’: a cringeworthy musical movie moment, if ever there was one. But this clip is almost as funny, and educationalists in particular need to pay attention! Because what we have here is John Gielgud in his smartest most authoritative outfit showing Peter Finch some of the progressive wonders of this alternative society, a bit like a head of a Montessori school showing a prospective parent some of the wonderful creative and free thinking activities their offspring will enjoy. So we see a wonderful smiling Liv Ullman, for yes it is she, not drilling her assorted flock on their times tables, and certainly not reinforcing binary ways of interpreting their world, but leading them out from their (open-sided, anyway) ‘classroom’ to do some good old dancing and singing and larking about (while perhaps inadvertently introducing some ideas about relativity.). There’s a touch of the Julie Andrews, too, leading a trail of joyously singing Von Trapps up a hillside with spectacular views , and why not . Yes Liv Ullmann, a million miles from her serious Nordic beginnings; she must have taken to this role though, because a few years later, Vic and I saw her perform in another musical version of a previously non music drama ‘I Remember Mama’. This we saw on Broadway in our U.S. Greyhound bus holiday.
The children end the song session by rolling down the hill, ending up, if I remember rightly, at the feet of Finch and Gielgud (who promises him he’ll get a chance to meet the alluring school teacher for himself, in days to come!). I think health and safety should have been involved, with some risk assessment of all that rolling.
I remember someone, some years ago now, choosing this very song as one of their eight ‘desert island discs’ (shouldn’t be so too hard to trace, if I could be bothered; I recall another of the choices was the prologue song from Sondheim’s ‘Sweeney Todd’) and they waxed lyrical –catch my irony –about the melodic construction of the song. I couldn’t be as eloquent, since I am a words man, as you know. And about the words, I’d probably say they do not bear too much analytical scrutiny : the ‘world as circle’ metaphor is probably about as profound and probing a piece of Zen philosophy as Elton John’s ‘Circle Of Life’. In this case ‘the world is a circle without a beginning/and nobody knows where the circle ends/everything depends on where you are in the circle….’ etc. Hmmm.The verses seemed to be comforting assurances for the small, the weak, the slow etc – and a reminder not to compare yourself, or if you do, compare yourself to somebody even smaller, weaker, or slower. Nice idea. (‘And just because they say you’re slow,/That doesn’t mean that you’re slow, you know./And even if you’re never first,/Compared to someone who’s last,/They’re sure to think you are fast.’) Bobby Van (who?) in flares, joins in some of the lines.
If you’ve got this far, you may already be thinking: this is all a bit sad for a 66 year old to be occupying himself on such ephemera. You’re probably right. Does it deserve a place in these 100 song-essays? Dotty and I think so: let’s hear it for the endearing bad musical, and the tunefully well-intentioned songs they contained,that can still raise a smile on a cold day.
Going for a Song 