Also in my quest for inspirational pulp adventure, I checked out Lost Horizon, not realizing until it was in the DVD player that it was a Frank Capra movie. Yerk. Couldn’t even sit through the whole thing.
This was not two-fisted adventure; it was one-fisted, and that for about half a second, in a performance that rates somewhere below the Three Stooges for realistic brawling. Promises that this was a darker turn from Capra’s usual work are only true in comparison to Capra’s usual work, not to any absolute scale, which is to say the movie doesn’t end with everyone wildly celebrating small-town American values. There’s still plenty of heavy-handed preaching; it’s just that this morality play ends by showing us what happens to greedy little boys and girls, rather than rewarding the good ones who live by simple faith.
There’s bits and pieces of pulp adventure here: a lost world, a natural aristocracy of whites over the darkies, airplanes still treated as something exotic. But you can’t call it “pulp adventure†when there’s no adventure. I can’t build an RPG campaign around this. The gravest danger the PCs would face is the possibility of the High Lama (a transplanted European, naturally) talking my players to death.
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