[Lost Horizon] is a very long picture, this disappointing successor to Mr. Deeds, and a very dull one as soon as the opening scenes are over…. Here the Capra-Riskin partnership is at its best, and we are unprepared for the disappointments which follow: the flavourless uplifting dialogue, the crude humour, the pedestrian direction, and the slack makeshift construction….

Of course, the picture isn't quite as bad as that. It does attempt, however clumsily and sentimentally, more than the average film; a social conscience is obscurely at work, but at work far less effectively than in Mr. Deeds, and as for the humour—it consists only of Mr. Edward Everett Horton wearing Eastern clothes. The conscious humour that is to say, for the glimpses of English political life give a little much needed relief…. But it is in the last sequence that the Capra-Riskin collaboration fails most disastrously…. A...