Frank Capra directs Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt and Edward Everett Horton in this fantasy adventure where a plane full of Westerners discover Shangri-La hidden in the Tibetan mountains.

This has dated poorly. The utopia is creepy. The politics racist. We never recover from the all action opener. The first 15 minutes have an on-location chaos and scale that is impressive. You can see the influence on the entire Indiana Jones series in these sequences. Everything else that follows is overly talky and naive in comparison. Just when we threaten to get back to derring-do two hours later, the film is tied up by a new character, a stuffy official, recounting the excitement of a final act we never get to see for ourselves.

5