Pre-viewed for quality and played fine on my JVC s-vhs deck, everything looks nearly new, cassette nice. Box has a couple of light horizontal scores on the back.
Filmed in glorious Black & White it won the Academy Award for set/art design, it was the largest ever built.
Frank Capra's ('Its a Wonderful Life') style meshed perfectly with the pacifist theme of James Hilton's classic novel. This version restores more than 20 minutes that has been cut over the years but with a hitch. Some of these film elements have been lost forever and still photos fill in these gaps, but the soundtrack is still intact. No where on the box does it mention that it was "restored" this way.
A group of strangers fleeing revolution in China are lost in the Tibetan Himilayas when their plane crashes and they stumble across the valley of a lush & green Shangri La. The inhabitants of the Utopian community where time stands still have lived for hundreds of years in secret, kindness and peace--but what will the intrusion of these strangers bring?
Initially anxious to return to civiliztion most of the newcomers grow to love Shangri La, where aging, greed, and brutality are non-existent, an idyllic existence everything man searches for. And indeed, Gloria, a woman with a fatal disease in the group seems to be miraculously recovering!
Conway is enchanted with Sondra, a resident, and George likewise with Maria, but they want to leave together. Having had an audience with the High Lama (Sam Jaffe), he tells the men that Maria is much older than she looks, having came there in 1888 and that he himself is 200 years old preserved by the magical properties of this paradise.
George refuses to believe the Lama's fantastic story and sets out to leave...