“Now that you have successfully thwarted me and placed in my path the only obstacle which I could not make provision for, I feel I can tell you I have never really enjoyed your company very much. And furthermore, you play an abominable game of whist. Good day, sir.” – Phileas Fogg, laying down the ultimate insult, Around the World in 80 Days
By the mid-1950s, television had cut deeply into the movies’ bottom line, so the studios retaliated by going big. Bigger stories and bigger shooting became the norm with an emphasis on huge sprawling shots to emphasize the bigness of movies that television couldn’t replicate, along with gimmicks like the first 3-D films and Cinemascope-type shots to give audiences a feeling of “You are there.” So basically the same strategy Hollywood is employing today to combat the rise of High-Def televisions and cable stations (and arguably a higher quality of product than what the movies are churning out).
Even though the past few Best Pictures had focused on ordinary people in smaller locations (although From Here to Eternity compensated by including a big budget reproduction of the attack on Pearl Harbor), 1956’s Best Picture, Around the World in 80 Days kicks off an era of big budget productions winning the award, as the awards cycled back to a celebration of big movie making that they hadn’t really embraced since Gone With the Wind in 1939.
A close up from the movie’s most famous sequence, the hot air balloon trip.
Around the World in 80 Days may also be the silliest movie to win best picture. Most Best Pictures, as is the justifiably earned cliché, are very serious affairs dealing with social ills or questions of conscious amongst its main characters. Not so with Around the World in 80 Days, which is almost a fantasy, a child-like adventure story with a nostalgic gaze to the past when the world was just starting to become interconnected. This isn’t a knock on the film, which despite a three hour run time is a fun, swiftly moving romp.
Set in 1872 at the dawn of speedy world travel, Phileas Fogg (David Niven) is the most eccentric member of a snooty upper class British gentleman’s club. During idle chit chat over a game of whist with several other members of the club, Fogg posits that a man could travel around the world in under 80 days given the current state of transportation (there aren’t airplanes yet, obviously). He bets the princely sum of £20,000 (more than 1.5 million pounds in today’s money) that he can make the trip, taking along a satchel of seemingly endless wealth and his goofy, acrobatic manservant Passepartout (Cantiflas – before you ask, he was a very famous Mexican comedy star).
When an avalanche halts his train, the always prepared Fogg buys a hot air balloon, giving the film its most iconic sequence as he and Passepartout sail across the sky, drinking their daily tea. I n Spain, Passepartout takes part in a bull fight to win a boat ride from a sheik. In Egypt, the duo begin to be trailed by Inspector Fix (Robert Newton) a private eye who believes Fogg is using the trip as a cover-up for a London bank robbery. In India, they rescue Princess Aouda (Shirley McClain – not Indian at all, it should be noted) from a human sacrifice. They travel to the US where they fight Native Americans on a train. While traveling across the Atlantic, Fogg has to cannibalize the boat, burning everything that isn’t essential to make the trip on time but is arrested by Fix for his supposed crime. Fogg is cleared minutes too late to make the bet – until Passepartout realizes they hadn’t accounted for the International Date Line while making their journey.
The principle characters, Princess Aouda (Shirley MacLaine), Phileas Fogg (David Niven) and Passepartout (Cantiflas)
As you can gather, this movie lacks the emotional complexity of On the Waterfront or Marty. It has an almost child-like sense of the world, with adventures and thrills but never any sense of personal danger to the travelers. Even during the fight with the Native Americans, passengers are shot with arrows and just pull the arrows out and keep fighting. This movie triumphed for its style. Around the World in 80 Days is the first of the Best Pictures that felt to me that it could belong in the modern era of filmmaking. The colors are bright and vibrant unlike the peculiar Technicolor process of color movies before this. The shots are cut faster. There are several traveling scenes that are clearly inserted to wow audiences watching them on the big screen, such as the vistas from the hot air balloon or the trans-oceanic cruises. The shots are clearly added for a “you are there” feel that must be fantastic on a big screen.
See how crisp, large and modern everything looks in this movie compared to what had come before?
A deeper movie would take a more serious look at Phileas Fogg. Fogg is almost a parody of the rational Englishman (like Sherlock Holmes). He’s so obsessed with schedule and routine that he is the perfect man to make the journey, but never appreciates it. In a running joke, Fogg makes his scheduled appointment with the traveling apparatus of the day but then retires to a card game, never making time to enjoy the sights of his journey. A deeper movie would explore this rather obvious character flaw for some effect, but nothing like that is forthcoming here (Fogg does declare his love for the Princess, out-of-nowhere, in the movie’s last ten minutes, but the whole thing feels forced).
The movie is also notable for inventing (or at least popularizing) the celebrity cameo. Each of Fogg’s stops features brief appearances from notable actors and actresses from the day, usually hamming it up or doing something anachronistic to break the fourth wall. Although a few of the cameos, like Frank Sinatra and Cesar Romero, might be recognizable to today’s audiences, most are not iconic enough to elicit much of a response (Jack Oakie? Gilbert Roland?) Still, there are something like 40 cameos in the movie, so it bears mentioning.
Around the World in 80 Days is a fun, epic movie, a forerunner of the big action adventure films that make up so much of the movies today. While it lacks the depth of most Best Pictures, it’s still an enjoyable ride.
Other Oscars: Cinematography, Color; Film Editing; Music, Scoring of a Dramatic of Comedy Picture; Best Writing, Best Screenplay, Adapted
Box Office: $23.1 Million (Second for the year)
Other Notable Movies of 1956: The Ten Commandments*$, Giant*, The King and I*, War and Peace, The Searchers, Bus Stop, High Society, Julie, Love Me Tender (First Elvis Movie), The Man Who Knew Too Much, Friendly Persuasion*, Anastasia, Lust For Life, Written on the Wind
#Best Picture Nominee
$Top Box Office: $43 Million
Operation: Oscar 