Frank Capra Fascism and Big Hollywood directors

[RonPrice]

EMBRYONIC FORMS

Frank Capra’s 1937 original movie Lost Horizon opened in March of 1937, the year after Mussolini annexed Ethiopia, Hitler occupied the Rhineland, and the Spanish Civil War started. It was a bad time for those who believed in the egalitarianism of a pluralist society of equal rights regardless of religion or ethnic origin. Capra was among the first of the big Hollywood directors to publicly denounce fascism and its persecution of minorities. For this reason Lost Horizon is an important film, although its narrative seems ponderous and slow today, the story sentimentalized, even mawkish and some scenes artificial. The film clearly espouses and defines a gospel of social moderation that most Americans believed in at that time. More importantly, from a Baha’i perspective, the film was released just one month before the beginning of the first teaching Plan which began in April 1937.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, December 13th 2005.

My mother was in love with Ronald Colman,
the lead actor, and so she named her only son
after him. Now…that’s me. Colman combined
being handsome with a symbolic association
with civilization, with utopian idealism,
with peace and love, harmony and unity
in a world between wars, with truths that
were perennial but not archaic, conservative,
yes, but believable if nostalgically colored.

There was some institutional embodiment
of memory and wisdom in that Shangri-La.
Little did my mother know then that
an instrument had just been forged,
had just taken its first shape and it was
beginning to create embryonic forms in
the four corners of the world, while tests
severe and unprecedented had also just begun
which would help to sink institutional roots
deeper and deeper into the soil of that continent.

A Depression was ending, hope stirred again;
my parents were about to meet and marry
while working at the Otis Company,
bringing my little self into being at the end
of what he called that preliminary task
in the unfoldment of a vision of a spiritual
destiny that would be fulfilled in my lifetime—
if I lived to be one hundred, so he said.1

1 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.13.

Ron Price
December 13th 2005