Around the World in 80 Days (1956) Review
4/10
A London club member bets twenty thousand pounds that he can circle the world in eighty days. He leaves with a valet, and a detective who thinks he’s robbed a bank follows him. 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.
I found this a slog. There’s charm in the first hour and there’s Cantinflas in the bullring, and the rest is nearly three hours of famous faces popping up to be admired while the story stands around waiting. I kept wishing someone would remember the bet. A film about racing the clock should never feel this slow, and this one drags almost from the moment Fogg leaves London.
The 4 is for a travelogue with a structure. The locations are real, the widescreen process was new, and the film has no interest in anything except moving from one country to the next and showing you who’s in it.
It’s 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. It’s the production acknowledging that the recognition was the product and saving the inventory for last.
That mechanism has a cost and this film shows it completely. Every appearance stops the picture. The audience registers who has arrived, the narrative pauses, and then it resumes. Somewhere around the fifteenth cameo I stopped caring who was behind the next door, and the whole parade started to feel faintly insulting, as though the producers assumed I wouldn’t notice there was no movie between the famous faces.
The exception is Buster Keaton, who gets about ninety seconds as a train conductor and is the one appearance that does something. He’s physically funny instead of merely present. That’s 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’s no accumulation, because each appearance is designed to be self-contained.
A recognizable presence in a small part is an interruption with a running time. The reader stops to register it and the narrative pauses for the registration. One is a gift, five is a pattern, and forty is the structure. This film chose forty and the structure is the problem.
The same effect works in prose with a real person, a famous location or a familiar reference. The reader’s recognition is a break in the fiction. If you want the pleasure of recognition, build the work around it and accept that you’ve made something episodic. Don’t attach it to a story that needed momentum.
Todd-AO
The film’s actual purpose was to show a widescreen process Mike Todd had developed, and the process was superior to what CinemaScope was doing at the time.
Sixty-five millimeter negative, a very wide aspect ratio, thirty frames a second, and six-track sound, projected in specially equipped theaters. The image quality was considerably better than anything else available and the film is constructed to display it. The balloon is the clearest example and it’s 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 doesn’t 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 couldn’t. I’ll grant the Seville footage is gorgeous, and the balloon over the Alps is a lovely image. It’s also a picture of the problem. The film will stop dead for a view, and I sat through too many views wondering when somebody would do something.
It’s a demonstration reel with a plot. That’s what The Greatest Show on Earth is in a different form, and the Academy handing both of them Best Picture four years apart tells you what the membership valued in that decade.
Cantinflas
The one performance worth the film is Mario Moreno as Passepartout, and he’s 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’s the best fifteen minutes in the film. A real display of physical comedy in a real ring with a real bull, choreographed and performed by somebody who understood both bullfighting and slapstick. That bullfight is the reason the rating isn’t lower. Moreno’s timing is exact, and I laughed harder at him in that ring than at anything else in the picture. He makes me wish the whole film had been built around him and Niven had been sent home. He’s also given more screen time than David Niven and is effectively the protagonist, which the marketing didn’t reflect and which a modern viewer notices immediately.
A performer operating in a different tradition from everybody else will dominate a work whether you intended it or not. Cantinflas is doing physical comedy in a film of English drawing-room delivery. That’s worth knowing if you’re assembling an ensemble. One person working in a stronger tone will become the subject.
Give your best performer the sequence their skill was built for. The bullfight exists because Cantinflas could do it, and that’s the correct reason for a scene. Marketing and structure can disagree, and readers will notice the structure. This film’s billing is wrong about its own protagonist.
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. That’s the source’s actual pleasure and is largely absent here.
There’s also no jeopardy. Fogg has unlimited money and buys his way out of every obstacle, so the film’s only tension is arithmetic about the calendar, settled by a trick about the international date line. That drove me up the wall. I can’t root for a man who never loses anything, and Niven plays him so smoothly that I stopped believing he’d notice if he lost the bet.
That trick is also the novel’s and it’s a good one. Fogg has gained a day traveling east and doesn’t know it. That’s a real 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. That’s a piece of casting the record now states plainly and which nobody involved appears to have questioned at the time. The suttee sequence she’s rescued from is also handled as an adventure beat, with no interest in what is being depicted. That’s 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’s 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 considerably better films.
It also won five in total, including Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing and Score. That 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 couldn’t, and a film built to show 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.
A work that exists to show a technology will be rewarded during the period when the technology is the industry’s anxiety, and will be unwatchable once the anxiety passes. That’s happening now with other technologies and the outcome will be the same. Technical superiority isn’t a subject. The format was better and the film has nothing in it, and only one of those facts survived.
A hundred and seventy-five minutes is also the wrong length for the material. The novel is short, the structure is episodic, and a film with no jeopardy and forty interruptions needed to be considerably briefer than the nearly three hours this one occupies. Todd died in a plane crash in 1958, at forty-eight, having produced one film. The Todd-AO process outlived him and carried South Pacific, Cleopatra and later The Sound of Music.
Should you watch Around the World in 80 Days?
The bullfight, and the first hour if you have the patience. Past that, it’s a travelogue built to sell a projection system, forty famous people stopping the film one at a time, and a hero with unlimited money and no interior. I give it a 4 because Cantinflas is wonderful and the Todd-AO images still look great, and I can’t go higher when the thing bores me for most of three hours. It won Best Picture over Giant, and voters made a bad call.
Phileas Fogg’s bet has a real-life cousin. Ralph Brown holds four world records and raced around the entire planet, and he told me what that kind of journey demands.
