Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

PHOTOS 1-5: Original lobby cards, hand-colored in 1937 (the movie is in black & white) -- Five reasons why you should get the new Blu-Ray: 1) It has one additional minute of new material not in the 1999 DVD. 2) Much better picture and sound than the 1999 DVD. 3) It comes packaged in a 32 page hard-cover book. 4) SDH subtitles for everything: even the audio commentary has it's own subtitles 5) Really cheap. They're practically giving it away. -- 1937 (March) When it was newly released, Frank Capra's 'Lost Horizon' was 132 minutes long -- 1937 (September) Columbia Pictures cut it to 118 minutes (and promptly "lost" 14 minutes) -- 1942: Cut to 110 minutes -- 1948: Restored to 118 minutes -- 1952: Cut to 92 minutes and sold to television -- 1986: Restored to 132 minutes (125 minutes of video - see below) by American Film institute and UCLA -- 1999: DVD release of 132 minute version -- 2017: Blu-Ray release of 132 minute version (126 minutes of video), updated and digitally remastered in 4-K Frank Capra's 132 minute 1937 version no longer exists. But the people responsible for the 1986 restoration got lucky and found the original 132 minute soundtrack (audio only). They then assembled every available print and fragment of the film in existence, and painstakingly synchronized the surviving visual elements to the 132 minute soundtrack. They even found the video for 7 of the 14 minutes "lost" in 1937, matched them to the soundtrack, and restored them to 'Lost Horizon'. The restored print had 125 minutes of video and 132 minutes of audio. Their solution for the missing 7 minutes was to use still photos of the missing scenes matched to the 7 minutes of audio. Good News: Following the release of the 1999 DVD, one additional minute of "lost" video was discovered and appears for the first time in the 2017 restoration: It's in chapter 8 where Ronald Colman first meets the High Lama played by Sam Jaffe. Additionally a better-looking 16mm print of the cut version was discovered. These two discoveries were the inspiration for the new restoration released in 2017. They were able to use modern 4-K digital restoration techniques, unavailable in 1986, to clean up the picture and sound for Blu-Ray. The "new" restored print has 126 minutes of video and 132 minutes of audio. 6 minutes of still photos. The blu-ray gives you a choice of five languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian), plus subtitles in 23 languages.