AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS

Since its admittedly undeserved Best Picture win, Around the World in Eighty Days has suffered from the same overkill scrutinizing as The Greatest Show on Earth, that other gigantic Best Picture winner of the 50s. So much has been made about their win being a victory of size over substance. The Greatest Show on Earth was further plagued by allegations that its win was a deliberate snub of High Noon by the Academy for its leftist elements and crew.

Stanley Kramer, co-producer of High Noon, said in his autobiography: “High Noon’s defeat in the Oscar race by Cecil B. DeMille’s circus picture, The Greatest Show on Earth, had to be largely political, and I’m not referring to the unspoken old-boy politics of Hollywood’s inner circle. I still believe High Noon was the best picture of 1952, but the political climate of the nation and the right-wing campaigns after High Noon had enough effect to relegate it to an also-ran status. Popular as it was, it could not overcome the climate in which it was released.”

            Around the World in Eighty Days escaped such a cloud of suspicion but, like The Greatest Show on Earth, is so often cited as being overrated. In his Film Guide, Leslie Halliwell said that the film is a triumph “less in traditional skills than in its producer’s [Michael Todd] energy.”

            Yes, Todd’s big visions and beautiful vistas come at the expense of character and narrative creation and critics are well justified in saying that The Searchers was a far worthier Oscar contender with a complexity that Michael Todd could never understand. But the continued animosity toward Around the World in Eighty Days, however justified, has obscured its undeniable delights, even if they are mere technical ones.

            Todd spared no expense. The film, with its 46 cameos, 7,959 animals, 68,894 extras, 34 directors shooting on 112 locations in 13 countries, cost $6,000,000. Todd eased his own fears by promising it would be, “the first movie ever to make $100 million”.

Elsewhere he saved, though he still kept an eye for detail. The shots taking place at sea, for instance, were mostly shot in a giant tank with a sky backdrop. Lee Zavitz, the special effects artist that recreated scale models of 19^th century ships, explained the painstaking process, “Our problem is absolute, convincing realism. Any tiny flaw will be magnified when the picture is shown.”

And so, technicians got to work around the clock on this little piece of the big picture. Zavitz went on to say, “The appearance of the water more than anything else is apt to give away a miniature-ocean shot. The whole thing looks phony if the water isn’t exactly right. First we set the wave machines to deliver an ocean swell scaled down to four inches instead of four feet. Next we want a little chop on top of the water. This is created by wind machines that also fill the ship’s sails and heel it over in the water. The wind machines also smooth out the crests of the swells so that rebounds from the sides of the tank won’t be apparent.”

The wreck of a steam engine proved most challenging for Zavitz and alone cost $40,000. Traveling to Colorado, the crew filmed some shots of actual steam engines that were still in operation. Back in Hollywood, they recreated the steel giants into miniature counterparts for the climactic shot of a railroad trestle giving way as the locomotive passed over. This model was then placed against a gully in the hills near Hollywood, spruced up to match the real river in Colorado.

“After the trestle was built we placed a four-inch pipe across its bottom, extending from one side of the river to the other,” Zavitz said. “The pipe was hidden by the water. Then we ran concealed cables from various parts of the trestle down to the pipe and attached them at different points. Thus, when the pipe was rotated by a motor the cables wound around it. The cables tightened one at a time and successively brought down different portions of the trestle. The whole collapse had to occur in just the same way that an actual trestle would weaken and fall. It would have been simple to send the train across the trestle under its own power and we might have done this if the story called for the train to run off the trestle and crash in the river. But the running of the train and the collapse of the trestle had to be timed to a fraction of a second. Nothing could be left to chance. There could be no trial runs, no rehearsals. So the train was dragged across the trestle by a cable you don’t see on the screen. It was hidden between the rails at the top of the trestle. The cable was attached to a winch that was geared to move the train at a speed of five feet per second. That way we dovetailed its run with that of the motor that turned the pipe to wreck the structure.”

            In a sense, what Todd did here was rethink the possibilities of cinema. But this ultimately proved disastrous in his hands. His finished product looked not like the work of a cinema inventor but a mad scientist of the movies. Todd’s interest in film was, after all, secondary to his interest in showmanship in broader terms. Film was simply the most accessible outlet for his ambition. But the traditional movie, especially as it was largely recognized in the studio days, was too small a thing for his vast inventiveness and so, like Orson Welles before him, he sought to redefine cinema incorporating elements of theater, showmanship, and scale. Welles, however, respected cinema as a medium and though he tested its boundaries, he understood its language. Todd’s film is a weird hybrid. At best, Todd’s creation is a curious mutation. At worst, it’s too much of too many things. There hasn’t been anything like it since and not for very flattering reasons.

            Take, for instance, the opening segment in which Edward R. Murrow lectures on Jules Verne’s foresight and how close to his dreams the world had come by mid-20^th century. It’s really the familiar frame narrative device (a storyteller leads into the central plot, presented as a flashback), this time detached from the film’s core. Organically, it doesn’t belong here and feels misplaced. If Todd had to include it, which he might have felt obligated to since, as Bosley Crowther noted in the New York Times, the sequence is a nod to the first Cinerama show, it would have worked best as a preceding short separated from the feature. As part of the feature, this sequence, with its stock footage of space, illustrated history of man and flight, and  a huge chunk of Georges Méliés Voyage Dans la Lune, is but the most obvious example of the kind of narrative disassociation that runs rampant throughout the picture.

            The flesh of the movie is made up of several mini travelogues, mostly showcasing customs and traditions from various countries. Jules Verne story about Phileas Fogg, an Englishman who sets off to prove it’s possible to circle the globe in eighty days, is merely the spine. Occasionally the surfacing of Inspector Fix (Robert Newton), a Scotland Yard sleuth chasing Fogg in his travels, believing him to be a wanted jewel thief, gives what is essentially a long travelogue the remote semblance of a movie.

            As far as it goes, Todd’s cinematography is gorgeous and must have been breathtaking seen in 70 mm film (twice the size of the standard film). This new celluloid scale (first seen in Oklahoma! the previous year), dubbed Todd-AO by Todd’s production company, was presented as an answer to Cinerama and launched a new experiencing film. Is Michael Todd the grandfather of IMAX? It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest it, as Fogg’s flight over the Alps on a hot air balloon bears a striking resemblance to To Fly!, one of the first IMAX movies which is still a staple of the National Air and Space Museum.

            If Todd was a film pioneer it was as a documentarian. His shots (elephants at an Indian watering hole, bison blocking a steam engine in the American plains, ancient statues in Japan, serene shots of the French countryside, golden sunsets, etc.) are both the flowering of the travelogue short subjects then in vogue, such as Disney’s People & Places and True-Life Adventures series and the growth of cinéma vérité in the next decade, even the shockumentaries of the late 60s; though Todd’s eye for beauty never for a moment suggests he would have approved of Mondo Cane-style filmmaking. He does, after all, give us the most bloodless bullfight ever.

            But this beauty comes at a price of crucial cinematic pillars, especially character dynamics. Fogg is not only played by David Niven but is a caricature of the David Niven stereotype; the Victorian Englishman seemingly incapable of surviving without a manservant or outside of the Reform Club, and yet with a craving for adventure that cannot be ignored. Princess Aouda is a mess for reasons beyond the casting of Shirley MacLaine as an Indian beauty. She does nothing and brings nothing to what narrative there is, even by the standards of damsels in distress. She doesn’t even attempt to stop her death at the hands of a religious sect and is only saved when Fogg intervenes (actually, his valet Passepartout does all the work and his master takes the credit). It’s far from enlightened anyway, but if an Englishman must be the only way out for an Indian princess, why not go for the Erroll Flynn or Stewart Granger type? Can anyone really accept the foppish Fogg risking his neck for a woman?

            As the bumbling Passepartout, Cantinflas steals the show. He retains the character’s French name from the book, but, for the sake of his fans, remains the same Mexican comic loved throughout Latin America. This would be his first American movie after twenty years of being a star in Mexico and, though he is the life of the picture, Todd’s lack of appreciation for personality (comic or otherwise) curtails many of his best moments, the first being the clumsy valet’s failed attempt to turn off the gas valve in the hot air balloon and subsequent entanglement in the ropes. What could have been classic slapstick is cut short, Todd content to leave it at cute instead of funny.

            Where Cantinflas is really robbed of material is his push into the bullring upon the pair’s arrival in Spain. Fogg is fearing a massacre in the arena but, strangely, Passepartout says he is not afraid. But once he faces the bull, Passepartout beings to quiver and we are set for a thrilling farce of the blood sport. Bullfights always provided a great setting for comic action in cartoons, the medium that took the best advantage of it, notably the Bugs Bunny classic Bully for Bugs. But cartoons set in the ring were almost always winners; Daffy Duck’s Mexican Joyride, Señor Droopy, the Pink Panther’s Bully for Pink, one of Goofy’s best cartoons For Whom the Bulls Toil, and Disney’s Academy Award winning Ferdinand the Bull was the deliberate anti-thesis of the experience.

            Live action comedies seldom knew how to make the best of the scares and energy of the scenario and Around the World in Eighty Days follows the pattern. Passepartout is pushed into the arena and to our shock and dismay…performs well. The sad reality sinks in that Todd was not interested in taking advantage of the set-up for great slapstick but in showcasing a bullfight more or less straight. To his good fortune, Cantinflas was an experienced toreador and lends authenticity to the sequence. But given the promise it held, the entire scene is as disappointing as the climactic battle with the horned beast in Laurel & Hardy’s The Bullfighters where what could have been the highlight is little more exciting the newsreel footage of the sport.

            Cantinflas is given one good moment, however, and it’s his brush with the Sioux once the team reaches America. It’s hardly enlightened, the Sioux capture him, tie him to a pole, and dance as fire burns around the captured Passepartout, but it is old-fashioned fun of the sort fans of Tintin remember.

            When all is said and done, what is used to best advantage is the cast of cameos. There’s Fernandel as the confused coachman, Charles Boyer as a balloon master, Peter Lorre as a kooky skipper, Marlene Dietrich paying tribute to her role as a saloon floozy in Destry Rides Again, George raft as the sleazy saloon owner, Red Skelton as a drunken freeloader, John Carradine as the town loudmouth, Joe E. Brown as a porter, Frank Sinatra as a pianist, and Buster Keaton as a bumbling conductor. The term cameo is rumored to have originated here. Be that as it may, Around the World in Eighty Days set the mold for future travel epics with iconic faces turning up in the most surprising spots, notably It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The star gallery remains the best thing about Around the World in Eighty Days. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but it’s senseless to quibble about gimmickry when the success of the film was the result of gimmickry. But, oh, what fun and beautiful gimmicks they are.