Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

Written by James Poe, John Farrow, & S. J. Perelman

Directed by Michael Anderson

I love to travel. I hate flying, but I love to travel. I’m also a fan of The Amazing Race, so a film like Around the World in 80 Days was sure to catch my interest on this list. Even if it hadn’t won Best Picture, I’d have wanted to watch it, but the fact that it did made it so much more appealing. A movie about travel, with a time component, AND it won Best Picture? Delicious.

Good lord this movie was a mess. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some redeeming qualities to it, but in a big picture sense, I just don’t understand how this film won Best Picture (it beat DeMille’s The Ten Commandments!). It was somewhat enjoyable, but I don’t think it’s Best Picture worthy, by a long shot.

Stars David Niven and Cantinflas

I first (and mostly) want to address the film’s length. I have nothing against long movies, and at three hours, I was surprised but not appalled at this film’s running time; after all, Gone With the Wind is nearly four hours. I was just shocked that the film ran this long; who’d have guessed that? The problem is, of that three hours, there’s MAYBE about 90 minutes of plot content. This film LOVES to spend minutes (a lot of minutes) just showing off images of the world (which, yes, is to be somewhat expected), but these sequences just go on and on. Even the beginning of the film features a introduction by journalist Edward R. Murrow, which runs for nearly seven minutes and features a long look at Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, which...why? Get on with it already! This introduction also has nothing to do with the rest of the film; it’s merely exploring Jules Verne’s creativity. That would be fine if we weren’t about to watch a film based on said creativity!

(I did have a moment when, near the beginning of the introduction, Murrow said (and I paraphrase here), “No one yet has gone to the moon”, to which I was momentarily confused, then realized that this film was released 13 years before we landed on the moon).

Shirley MacLaine and David Niven

After a while, the film simply feels like an excuse to show off the various images of the world. It almost felt like something you’d see at World Showcase in EPCOT. Added to that are additional sequences that do nothing to actually further the plot (most notably, Passepartout’s bull-fighting or appearance in Japanese theater), and the whole thing just feels inflated to its absolute breaking point. I will point out that the version I watched seems to be the full-length “roadshow” version, complete with intermission, entr’acte, and exit music, so some of the running time is devoted to that, but again, condensing the film to its essential plot points would leave a film of probably 90 minutes, or perhaps even less.

The casting of the film is a little dubious, as well. David Niven and Cantinflas are cast well in their leading roles, but the rest of the cast falls short. The film is full of cameos, but I didn’t recognize most of them. There’s some fun intrigue of Robert Newton’s Inspector Fix following undercover and trying to arrest Niven’s Phileas Fogg, but once he’s discovered, he just...tags along? No one seems to send him away, or, if there’s a reason for him to be allowed to stay with the group, that scene is never shown.

That would be ANOTHER issue I have with the film’s running time. It spends so much time showing us things we don’t need to see, yet never shows us things we DO. Why is Cantinflas’ Passepartout fighting bulls as a matador? Why is he suddenly onstage in a Japanese theater? We never know! He’s just...there, doing it. Even in a critical scene in which Native Americans attack a steam train (look, it’s racist as hell, just leave it at that), Passepartout ends up on the roof of the train (because plot reasons), and suddenly we see him tumbling down a hillside. Yes, he fell off the train, but we never see WHY. The film is chock full of these things. It’s like they shot 95% of the film, and never bothered to have the Second Unit go in and film all the in-between stuff that you never notice when it’s actually there.

(Two other minor notes that don’t really warrant separate paragraphs, and I’ve ranted long enough: the lenses on the cameras used on this film are DIRTY AS HELL, and it drove me nuts, and secondly, this is technically the first film on this list where the credits are at the end of the film. That’s a fun little nugget for me.)

All in all, this film, to me, is a prime example of a film that, at the time, may have been the Best Picture of 1956 (although I do find that to be incredibly hard to believe), but now, doesn’t hold up. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve heard this about many Best Picture winners (2005’s Crash is the oft-cited example of this), and I would definitely place this film in that category. Two great performances and some nice documentary-style aerial cinematography don’t save this film from being an over-inflated behemoth.

FINAL GRADE: C-