Michael York – Christian Sauvé

Lost Horizon (1973)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-08-152023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, August 2019) Good lord, that was terrible. I had heard that the 1973 remake of Lost Horizon was awful but I still watched it anyway, out of curiosity as to how it would compare to the 1930s original. I should have known better—While the first few minutes of the film aren’t completely terrible, the film soon takes a straight dive off the ridiculousness board by peppering the action with … musical numbers. Bad, forgettable, uninspired, disjointed musical numbers that couldn’t be more useless if they tried. I’m normally a fan of musicals, but not of 1970s musicals for exactly how Lost Horizon is so incredibly misguided. I’m not sure who thought adding musical numbers to the story would help, but it brings me some comfort to think that they’re probably dead now and unlikely to ever strike again. The 1970s were a low point for musicals (even the next two decades without musicals were better than the ones made during the 1970s) and this film couldn’t demonstrate it more clearly. I would say that removing the musical numbers would dramatically improve the film, but that’s not entirely true: Even simply aping the 1930s film is a bad idea given how it doesn’t revisit the horrifying orientalism clichés of the original—you could find the original racist and yet kind of old-school charming, whereas this one definitely should have known better. But Lost Horizon gets worse the closer you look at it. By the end, I was openly laughing at the ineptness of the staging in which a character (played by Michael York in a career-low point) causing a deadly avalanche, suddenly discovering a cavern three metres ahead of him (with wobbly icicles!), and then thankfully jumping to his death. It’s that kind of film with that kind of effect, where the characters are so painfully dumb and detestable that you openly cheer for their demises. Lost Horizon is almost forgotten today, and a rare recipient of a Wikipedia page that acknowledges that it was a critical and commercial bomb back then and that its current reputation hasn’t gotten any better. Even the decades of jokes about Lost Horizon (including a great one from Woody Allen himself) are better remembered than the film itself. As it should be.

Movie Review

Logan’s Run (1976)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-01-132017-08-29 Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, January 2017) There’s a temptation, in watching old Science Fiction, to ask if it has correctly predicted the future. This completely misses the point: SF reflects the times in which it is made, and it’s never an attempt to predict the future as much as it’s a way to make sense of the present. This is not the same question as whether it has aged well, given how a film can be just as enjoyable as a period piece. In watching Logan’s Run, which was presented as a major Science-Fiction picture of its time, it’s hard to avoid thinking that movie Science Fiction has progressed a lot since then. Logan’s Run is such a … different … piece of work that it can barely be criticized according to today’s baselines. On one level, characters act like lobotomized idiots. On another, it’s hard to see where the intentional stylization ends and where the silliness begins. Watching it, it’s no wonder if most people thought that Science Fiction was dumb trash back then, because exemplar Logan’s Run is dumb trash. No wonder a lot of people hated SF at the time, one year before Star Wars. Silly costumes, social mores that make no sense, voluntarily stupid dialogue and twists that aren’t: Either our standards have dramatically increased, or the film was moronic from the get-go. (I suspect a lot of both.) Michael York and Jenny Agutter do what they can with what they’re given—watch for a short appearance by Farrah Fawcett midway through. This being said, I still think that Logan’s Run is worth a close and occasionally horrified look: The special effects are still intriguing, and the sense of pure strangeness today is to be cherished: It is a very seventies film. Watching it in French only adds to the experience by cranking up the strangeness even further.