Sometimes an actor can say most with his eyes, and if anybody ever did that, it was Ronald Colman. He's easy to impersonate -- Harvey Korman did it all the time, but his voice was one thing, and his eyes another.
Lost Horizon is, like The Wind in the Willows, in part an exercise in British wistfulness, but, also, like The Wind in the Willows, it's far more than that, because it touches on the deepest longings of the human heart, regardless of time and place and politics and the noisy things. It's likely that neither work could have come to be without a British education that is now gone. Yet I think that James Hilton was seeking something greater than Shangri-La -- something he lightly touches by having the ruler of Shangri-La be one Father Perrault, a mysterious Catholic priest, gentle, wise, and very, very old.
Most of Frank Capra's movies, too, ask questions we like to avoid: "Why do we do what we do? What's the point of our work? What's the point of law and politics? Why the bustle? What do we seek?"