Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Around the World in Eighty Days is the twenty-ninth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. In a previous installment of this series I talked about Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement as a fascinating product of its time. Watching through the Best Picture winners certain patterns emerge and most of the Oscar winning films make sense in the context of their time. Every once in a while though, a tremendous oddity emerges. Something so bizarre in tone and construction that its hard to believe it was ever made — and even remade 50 years later. One such film is Michael Anderson’s Around the World in Eighty Days.
Adapted from one of Jules Verne’s famous novels, Around the World in Eighty Days traces the journey of English socialite Phileas Fogg (David Niven) as he attempts to — as the title suggests — circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. That may not seem like much of a challenge now, or even in 1956, but when Verne wrote the story in the late nineteenth century it was almost unthinkable. Accompanying Fogg is his ever loyal and multitalented assistant, Passpartout (played by a spirited Cantinflas.) The pair travel East around the globe, racing against the clock with twenty thousand British pounds on the line. Anderson’s film is a unique blend. Part comedy, part adventure, the movie plays as a glossy travelogue in moments and a festival of cameos at others. The opening ten minutes are a tribute to Jules Verne and his influence on cinema, including a lengthy, uninterrupted sequence pulled straight from Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon. It is a chaotic and strange way to structure a film, but entertaining nonetheless. When Around the World in Eighty Days works, it leans into its eccentricities. The technicolor landscapes — many shot on location — are stunning even today. Most of the natural wonder is filtered through the awestruck eyes of Cantinflas, who shoulders a great deal of the emotional heft of the film. His womanizing antics and acrobatic set pieces provide broad comedy, but he also subtly internalizes the humbling grandeurs of the world his Passportout discovers. It is also a blast to see the cameo reveals of all star extras, even when it adds little to the film and especially because many of the A-listers would be unrecognizable to most modern audiences. Frank Sinatra and his big blue eyes beam out from behind a piano in a western saloon. Peter Lorre assists Passportout on a ferry to Japan. Included among the supporting stars are Noel Coward, Buster Keaton and Red Skelton. Seemingly every few minutes the camera lingers on a face that we can only assume was Hollywood royalty in the fifties. It’s a delightfully strange experience now 70 years removed from these actors heyday. Other oddities in the filmmaking are similarly audacious but land less successfully. Much of the score is composed of well known songs or anthems that are played so earnestly that it almost comes across as irony. Many of Fogg’s triumphs are backdropped by ‘God Save the King’ and his trip across America frequently is accompanied by ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. What is more telling about the issues of the film may just be how Passportout’s antics are scored by ‘La Cucaracha.’ Even for a film made in the 50s race is a tremendous sore spot for Around the World in Eighty Days. Playing ‘La Cucaracha’ over the Mexican actor is a relatively minor transgression in a film with a number of egregious choices. Attempts at showcasing culture around the world often devolve into stereotypes. When a band of Native Americans attacks a train Fogg and company are traveling on, the group of natives all have their skin dyed to add more orange and red tones. Even the small contingent that was actually of Native descent. Another key set piece sees Fogg and Passportout rescue an educated Indian princess from a throng of savage villagers looking to sacrifice her after the death of her husband. Along with the demeaning depiction of the locals, that Indian princess is played by Shirley MacClaine in skin darkening makeup. While these issues cannot be dismissed, they can be understood in the context of the time. Around the World in Eighty Days certainly is a product of its era and as such renders itself an enigmatic spectacle to viewers today. For more isolated communities and less traveled viewers of the time it must have been a genuine thrill to see the landscapes and creatures of the world beamed in vibrant technicolor onto their local theater screens. In that light, the film is an interesting early showcase of the way that cinema can open up the world as well as how it can ingrain stereotypes. As a cohesive picture, Around the World in Eighty Days does not hold up especially well. Its core appeal — a scenic tour of far off places — has been dulled by the advent of Google Images or Richard Attenborough documentaries. Depictions of race and fixation on British gambling are likely to alienate modern viewers. Instead the value of this Best Picture winner is in its strangeness and quirks. Interestingly, we are now nearly as far from the release of Around the World in Eighty Days as that film was from the book it was based on. Much like the film served as a window to the world in 1956, we can now look through that same window for a view into the sensibilities of that time. 5/10
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