Around the World in 80 Days (1956) Review

A London club member bets twenty thousand pounds that he can circle the world in eighty days. He leaves with a valet and is followed by a detective who thinks he has robbed a bank. Everybody they meet is somebody the audience recognizes.

It was also an enormous commercial success, the second highest grossing film of its year, and the cameo structure was copied immediately and repeatedly for the next two decades.

The 4 is for a travelogue with a structure. The locations are real, the widescreen process was genuinely new, and the film has no interest in anything except moving from one country to the next and showing you who is in it.

It is also the film that established the cameo as a marketing device, and that innovation is the most consequential thing about it and the reason it works as badly as it does.

The Cameo Was Invented Here

Around forty recognizable performers appear for a scene or a shot each. Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, John Gielgud, Noel Coward, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton and a great many more.

The term was reportedly coined for this production, and the structure is the innovation. Somebody famous appears, is recognized, does one thing, and leaves, and the pleasure is the recognition instead of anything the character does.

The credits also list them at the end instead of the beginning, in a long animated sequence by Saul Bass, which is the production acknowledging that the recognition was the product and saving the inventory for last.

That mechanism has a specific cost and this film demonstrates it completely. Every appearance stops the picture. The audience registers who has arrived, the narrative pauses for the registration, and then resumes.

The exception is Buster Keaton, who gets about ninety seconds as a train conductor and is the one appearance that does something. He is physically funny instead of merely present, which is the distinction the rest of the film ignores.

By the second hour the effect is a sequence of interruptions with travel footage between them. There is no accumulation, because each appearance is designed to be self-contained.

Todd-AO

The film’s actual purpose was to demonstrate a widescreen process Mike Todd had developed, and the process was genuinely superior to what CinemaScope was doing at the time.

Sixty-five millimetre negative, a very wide aspect ratio, thirty frames a second, and six-track sound, projected in specially equipped theaters. The image quality was substantially better than anything else available and the film is constructed to display it.

The balloon is the clearest example and it is not in the novel. Verne never puts Fogg in a balloon, the film invents the sequence entirely because the format needed an aerial shot over the Alps, and the image became the thing everybody remembers about a book that does not contain it.

That explains every choice in it. The bullfight, the balloon, the elephant procession, the train, the ship, and the Indian and Spanish locations exist because the format needed something to fill it.

The Spanish sequences ran longest because the format needed depth of field in daylight, and the film’s Seville material is the one stretch where the process is doing something a normal camera could not.

It is a demonstration reel with a plot, which is what The Greatest Show on Earth is in a different form, and the two of them winning four years apart is what this page is about.

Cantinflas

The one performance worth the film is Mario Moreno as Passepartout, and he is the reason any of it functions.

He was the most successful comic performer in the Spanish-speaking world and this was his English-language debut, and the physical work is on a level nobody else in the picture is attempting.

Moreno also negotiated a share of the profits, which was almost unheard of for a performer from outside the American industry at that point, and he reportedly made more from this film than anybody except Todd.

The bullfight sequence is his and it is the best fifteen minutes in the film. A genuine display of physical comedy in a real ring with a real bull, choreographed and performed by somebody who understood both bullfighting and slapstick.

He is also given more screen time than David Niven and is effectively the protagonist, which the marketing did not reflect and which a modern viewer notices immediately.

Niven and the Emptiness

Phileas Fogg is written as imperturbable and David Niven plays imperturbability well, and the result is a protagonist with no interior at any point.

The novel has the same problem and solves it with pace. Verne’s Fogg is a device and the book is short, and the film is a hundred and seventy-five minutes of a device.

Verne’s book is also considerably more interested in transport logistics than the film is. Timetables, connections, missed steamers, and the arithmetic of a schedule, which is the source’s actual pleasure and is largely absent here.

There is also no jeopardy. Fogg has unlimited money, buys his way out of every obstacle, and the film’s tension is entirely arithmetic about the calendar, which is resolved by a trick about the international date line.

That trick is also the novel’s and it is a good one. Fogg has gained a day travelling east and does not know it, which is a genuine piece of construction, and the film delivers it as information instead of as a discovery he makes.

Shirley MacLaine plays an Indian princess, in her third film, which is a piece of casting the record now states plainly and which nobody involved appears to have questioned at the time.

The suttee sequence she is rescued from is also handled as an adventure beat, with no interest in what is being depicted, which is the film’s general approach to every country it passes through.

Robert Newton is the other performance with anything in it and he died before the film was released. Fix is a detective who is wrong for the entire picture, pursues the wrong man across five continents, and Newton plays the dogged pointlessness of it as comedy.

1956

Best Picture went to this. The other nominees were Giant, The King and I, Friendly Persuasion and The Ten Commandments.

Giant is on this site and is a three-and-a-half-hour film about race, class and oil in Texas, with James Dean’s last performance, and George Stevens won Best Director for it while the picture lost to a travelogue.

The King and I won five including Best Actor for Yul Brynner and is a considerably better constructed entertainment than the winner. Friendly Persuasion is a Quaker family drama about pacifism during the Civil War. Any of the three would be a more defensible winner and two of them are substantially better films.

It also won five in total, including Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing and Score, which means the membership rewarded the assembly instead of any individual element. Nobody was nominated for acting in it.

The explanation is the format. 1956 was the middle of the industry’s response to television, the argument was that cinema had to offer something a screen at home could not, and a film built to demonstrate a superior projection system was the argument made flesh.

Cinerama had arrived four years earlier and CinemaScope three, and the industry was cycling through formats at a rate that made each one briefly the argument for cinema itself before the next replaced it.

Should you watch Around the World in 80 Days?

The bullfight, and the first hour if you have the patience. A travelogue built to demonstrate a projection system, forty famous people arriving one at a time and stopping the film each time, a protagonist with unlimited money and no interior, and the best physical comedian of his generation carrying all of it.

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