Best Picture: #29
Original Release Date: October 17, 1956
Rating: G
Runtime: 2 hours, 47 minutes
Director: Michael Anderson
Quick Impressions:
“Is this a children’s movie?” my daughter would ask in concern every few minutes.
“I don’t think they would have conceived of it that way at the time,” I kept answering. “It has an all-star cast, and it won Best Picture.”
“This looks like a movie you would watch in Disneyland,” she insisted. “All the other movies have been much more mature, and this one is about a hot air balloon.”
Honestly, you take your life into your hands every time you leave the ground, but for whatever reason, hot air balloons usually do signify cinematic whimsy.
As we watched on, she couldn’t decide if she liked the movie or not, which I thought was quite charitable of her.
“The genre is so different,” she reflected pensively. “Everything has been all, ‘War is horrible.’ Now we’re watching a bull fight.”
Around the World in 80 Days is a strange and baffling film. My daughter’s right. It’s completely unlike any Best Picture winner we’ve watched before. Early on, I was tempted to say it was terrible. But that’s not true. “Unusual” would be a more apt descriptor. No, that’s not going far enough. It feels like an experience rather than a film. My daughter likened it to a school assembly or (required) event. I think it feels like a theme park attraction. It’s not just like a movie you would watch at Disneyland. It’s like one of the rides!
First of all, the way it’s filmed is somehow simultaneously off-putting and compelling. It’s almost nauseating. (I don’t mean disgusting. I mean literally it messes with your brain and makes you feel unwell.) As I said to my daughter again and again, clearly this was made for an enormous theater screen that partially wrapped around at the ends. (My mother confirmed that it was filmed in Cinerama.) You can tell just by looking at it because the center of the picture is distorted, almost like a fish-effect so subtle that you slowly get a headache and start to wonder if you’re imagining the distortion.
Secondly, the screen (which is supposed to be much larger than our TV) is at almost every instant completely filled with a space enormous in scope, usually populated by a million extras, often talking at full volume. The effect is immersive in the extreme. If the protagonists are wandering through a crowd, you genuinely begin to feel like you’re there, too. After all, you can hear the extremely loud crowd noise all around you, and the center of the screen seems to be literally pulling you into the picture.
The movie famously boasts cameos like you’ve never seen before–over seventy or something. That may be an exaggeration, but it may not. If you have a moment, go ahead and search for your name on IMDb. Chances are, you were an extra in this film. An impressive number of genuine stars appear in cameo roles. In one brief saloon scene alone we bump into George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, Red Skelton, John Carradine, and Frank Sinatra. (Sadly this sounds like a lot more fun than it is.) And extras! There are so many extras crammed into every scene that at the end you feel like you’ve spent three hours reading every volume of Where’s Waldo?. (In fact, Waldo’s probably in this movie, too. I wouldn’t be surprised.)
In the dark, on an enormous screen with well-mixed sound, this would doubtless be a trippy, hypnotic immersive experience that would leave an impression for a lifetime. On a TV, it just manages to be baffling. Honestly, at many, many moments it seems staggeringly bad.
“But if it’s bad,” my daughter wondered, “why can’t we stop watching it? I think this movie has hypnotized us.” She meant that, and I agree. I’ll explain later.
The film’s sheer scope makes you think of other offensively ambitious projects like the Titanic and the Tower of Babel. This and its highly unusual method of storytelling make Around the World in 80 Days something special. It’s impossible to dismiss, but it’s almost just as hard to enjoy.
“What can I say about it?” my daughter complained at the end. “How can I possibly rank it with the others? It doesn’t have a plot.”
On the contrary, I assure you that it does.
The Plot:
Eccentric, fastidious, Victorian British gentleman Phileas Fogg (David Niven) makes a bet with some other members of his club that he can travel around the entire world in just eighty days. Then he does. Intermission and Entre’Acte included, his journey takes about three hours. Fogg’s comical, jack-of-all trades valet Passepartout (Cantinflas) manages to do something wacky yet strangely engaging in almost every country they visit. Meanwhile, a shockingly young Shirley MacLaine turns up as an Indian princess for some reason. Her presence is a highlight of the film, even though she says and does almost nothing of consequence, just like everyone else.
The Good:
This movie is something else. It really does feel like a theme park attraction…or just the whole theme park. At many moments, my daughter and I kept calling out similarities to Disneyland, Disney World, Medieval Times. The Disney similarities are overwhelming. My daughter commented several times on the extreme loudness of the background music, likening it to the streets of Disneyland where music is just being noisily piped in to make the experience more immersive for visitors. (I wouldn’t be surprised if back in 1956, they piped the smells of the Main Street bakery and candy store into movie theater auditoriums playing this film, too.) And it’s not just the score that is loud. It’s the crowd noise from the extras. The movie doesn’t rein it in at all, so you feel like you’re actually standing in the crowd yourself, experiencing all the chaos and confusion of a bustling city street.
The film feels so much like an attraction to be experienced along with the characters instead of a traditionally told story. You might go to a Disney park right now and find the whole thing in 3D plus scents or even presented via a trackless ride vehicle.
And my daughter is right. There’s something eerily, trippily hypnotic about the movie, too. This can’t be accidental. The film steadily builds this strange rhythm that appeals to some primitive part of your brain. At a certain point, nothing is even happening, and yet you can’t stop watching. Part of it may be the strange visual distortion of the screen. It’s almost like a challenge. It feels as if you can never see quite as well as you’d like to, as if you can’t quite take it all in. It’s like a dream.
And there are aural cues as well that have such a hypnotic effect. In one scene, Passepartout (for some reason) is fighting a bull. The teeming crowd (which is very loud) keeps chanting rhythmically, “Olé! Olé! Olé!” At a certain point, it starts to sound like a group prayer, a hypnotic chant. I started thinking of Ari Aster movies. I think the spookiness of all the perfect unison chanting reminded me of Midsommar. And then I noticed that flies would often land on the bull. And then the bull kept changing sizes. And I couldn’t tell if it was that slight distortion or quickly changing camera angles or they were switching out bulls. The effect was very trippy, and I started to think that this would be a great movie to watch while high. (Granted, I don’t use recreational drugs myself, so I could be wrong.)
It occurs to me that people might read this and assume I’m making fun of the movie. But I’m serious, and I think these things were done deliberately to create an irresistible, immersive effect so audiences would leave the theater with the impression that they themselves had just experienced something powerful. And that is filmmaking worthy of notice. If you ask me, that’s the reason the movie deserved to win Best Picture.
When I hear (positive) things said about this film, people always talk up the unprecedented number of cameos. But I think what makes the movie special is its desire to make audiences feel that they are experiencing an adventure themselves rather than watching a story about someone else.
The cinematography is often quite interesting, too, mostly because of the movie’s desire to show the audience everything it can possibly cram onto the screen all at once.
But my personal favorite aspect of the film is Victor Young’s score which I genuinely love. It boggles the mind that this film won five Oscars, but its award for Best Score is well deserved.
Best Scene:
If you ask me, the material in the Indian jungle is some of the strongest. For one thing, this is where they pick up Princess Aouda (Shirley MacLaine) who is a good addition simply because Fogg doesn’t exactly strike up fascinating conversations with Passepartout. The two of them are not very interesting together on screen in their quiet moments. (Of course, part of the problem may be that there are no quiet moments.)
If you’re like me, you’ll be stunned to see Shirley MacLaine so young, with such dark hair. (You’d think no one ever has been young before, the way I carried on about it.)
But what really thrilled me about these scenes is how much they seem to have inspired Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The similarities are overwhelming. (Now, granted, it’s possible that both this film and Lucas and Spielberg were inspired by the same earlier movies, but this is based on a Jules Verne novel.) The makers of The Chipmunk Adventure obviously liked this part, too.
Again, in this section, the theme park ride qualities of the film really come to the forefront. You’ll feel like you’ve been brushing aside jungle growth yourself as you watch.
And the score in this section of the film really is magnificent.
Best Scene Visually:
It’s pretty tough to beat the scenes with the hot air balloon. At that point, we had zero investment in the characters and weren’t thrilled with the plot, but when that hot air balloon shows up, it’s just shot so appealingly. The whole sequence is magical, for no logical reason I can think of. The feeling of wonder I had reminds me of how much I used to enjoy seeing illustrations featuring brightly colored candy in picture books when I was a little child. That was always much more satisfying than eating real candy. The balloon scenes inspire wonder and must have been difficult to shoot.
We also loved a bird’s eye view of Passepartout riding around in the dumbwaiter. (Hopefully a bird wouldn’t be in the dumbwaiter, but you know what I mean.) The top-down view makes the short trip look fun, and the sequence gave us the opportunity to make jokes about The Haunting of Hill House which we finally felt brave enough to watch last week.
Best Action Sequence:
The first half of the movie is a hundred times stronger than the second. That said, there are far better cameos in the second half. (Of course, it was a bit disappointing to watch with someone who knew none of the stars and vaguely sad to realize that my daughter doesn’t know Hermione Gingold or Glynis Johns from anything. How has she lived here and missed seeing The Music Man and Mary Poppins? At least she recognized Frank Sinatra!)
The best action sequence also comes at the end of the film. In fact, David Niven only really gets an opportunity to shine in the last ten minutes of the movie. I love the frenzied rush at the end. Seriously, Niven’s fraught encounter with Beatrice Lillie is the best material he ever gets! We watch and think, “Fogg finally gets to show some personality.” The End!
Most Oscar Worthy Scene:
My daughter was astonished to notice an extended end credits sequence for the first time in our project. The animated credits at the end of this film are amazing. They made me think fondly of The Pink Panther, and then started to remind me of a Beatles’ movie. They’re so strange and adorable, like a little clip-art music video. And they last long enough to be a mini-movie.
The Negatives:
David Niven is ostensibly the star of this film. He gets top billing and plays the protagonist, Phileas Fogg, one of just two characters who consistently appears on screen throughout the film’s entire–three hour!!–runtime. Yet Niven has few lines, and his character gets essentially no development. He also doesn’t do much, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be traveling around the entire globe getting into various scrapes and debacles. Usually he’s either checking his watch, buying a favor, or resolutely tossing off a stone-faced quip (often a joke for the audience that the actor understands as humor, but the character may not). The protagonist is always busy. He travels around the entire globe, yet he doesn’t get anywhere. His emotional journey is flat. He makes no interior progress. In the end, he does make one rather large change to his life, but he does so with jarring suddenness. It’s a very strange approach to storytelling.
Now I love David Niven, and I will admit that he’s great with the dry one-liners and fantastic at remaining composed while participating in situations that the audience (though not the character) recognize as absurd. Niven plays the character as intended. But whose idiotic intention was this? Telling a story this way is bizarre and frustrating.
Yes, it’s a neat stunt that 740 million stars have cameos in this film, but it would be nice if the just one of the three main characters got some actual meaty dialogue or character development.
As Passepartout, at least Cantinflas has stuff to do. In fact, what doesn’t he do? (Wait! I know! It’s get meaningful lines and character development.) At least Cantinflas gets lots of screentime (unlike Niven) and makes things happen (by doing stuff, unlike Niven’s character whose main job is to look at his watch, complain about the schedule, and pay people thousands of dollars to hurry). But Cantinflas really doesn’t grow, change, or learn either. And (worse!) none of the stuff he does ever matters to the plot. Sometimes we’re worried a delay might happen because of his antics, but then at the last second, it always turns out that Fogg has planned for that. Sometimes he does something (like fight a bull) at the request of another character, in exchange for a favor that will speed along the voyage. But these favors are almost always driven by some supporting character’s completely bizarre, whimsical request that is unnecessary and makes no sense. Even when something really big happens to Passepartout, something that should matter, it somehow still doesn’t matter. The time he’s drugged and kidnapped, for example, should be a big deal, but this turn of events inconveniences everyone for all of five minutes, and then nothing really comes of it.
Actually, the worst part of Passepartout’s development is that as someone who does so much and dominates so many scenes, he really should emerge as the lead in the story. But instead he is infantilized by the film, consistently shown to us as a child, full of wonder, getting into scrapes, not a man to be taken seriously like his white, English master Phileas Fogg. I think this is done without malevolence, just for comedic value, to make an antic adventure story. But I still find it sort of insidious and disturbing. It’s not necessarily racist (though the character’s name is French, and the actor is Mexican), but it’s a bumbling servant trope that just feels so lazy. (I know this is 1956, but they’re with it enough to show Fogg making a fool of himself by speaking baby talk to a man in Hong Kong whose English turns out to be every bit as good as his own. That’s a nice moment. It’s too bad the rest of the movie doesn’t rise to its standard.)
The child-like servant thing would probably bother me less if Passepartout grew in wisdom or confidence from essentially doing every unlikely activity that exists all over the world for three hours. But he really doesn’t. He has a shining moment at the end, but it comes about by chance, not because he’s learned something from his experiences. It’s also sort of grating to watch him do the dumbest, most culturally insensitive thing in every country, and then get immediately attacked by people insulted by his actions. (“Wouldn’t people be more likely to notice he doesn’t understand the culture and try to explain it to him instead of immediately forming an angry mob?” my daughter wondered. I mean, you would think so. But, admittedly, I never traveled the world in the late Victorian era.)
And then Shirley MacLaine as the princess just basically walks around looking astonishingly young and brunette the entire movie. Again, she does well with the material she’s given. But even the lines she has sort of get lost in the shuffle.
I think one reason these protagonists have no shining moments of growth or opportunities for interior exploration is that the movie just absolutely cannot narrow its focus at all. So lines or looks that could become moments aren’t showcased or made special in any way. The actors have nothing to do with this. They’re delivering their lines and acting their parts, but instead of limiting our focus so we can get to know the characters, the movie is like, “Well, here we are in the middle of a vast vista.” Imagine the opening of The Sound of Music. Now think, what if the movie just kept on like that? Maria is just dancing around on the mountain tops, and other characters join her, and they talk occasionally. But we’re always zoomed all the way out, experiencing every possible sight and sound of the Alps.
Seventy-something cameos and eighty days all over the world is impressive and all, but this movie absolutely refuses to limit its focus, and as a result, it’s kind of dizzying and overwhelming. It feels more like a theme park than a film.
And I know what my daughter means when she complains that there’s no plot. What she means is that the plot isn’t fleshed out. Elements of it make no sense, and there is no character development. Basically, the premise is the plot. Fogg is going to travel around the world in eighty days, by God, and stuff is going to happen on the journey whether it makes any sense or not.
Oddly, for a movie that offers so much–the whole world, every star–the film ends up being boring most of the time.
Now granted, there are moments that would have engaged an audience in 1956 more than they appeal to us–especially the American sequence on the train, complete with Indian attack. When the film originally came out, I’m sure that scene felt fresher and more fun (and less like old Disneyland attractions) and most audiences loved it. And obviously the millions of cameos would be a lot more fun for people familiar with those particular stars. For my daughter, seeing a few seconds of a bunch of faces she didn’t know wasn’t all that great.
Prime Video actually designates the movie as a children’s film. But if your children are begging to watch a movie about a hot air balloon race around the world, I recommend The Chipmunk Adventure instead. (That’s half as long and ten times as entertaining.)
Overall:
If you watch Around the World in 80 Days, you get to see an introduction that features Edward R. Murrow, the ground-breaking silent film A Trip to the Moon, and a real rocket launch. And the movie only gets bigger and stranger from there. I’m glad I saw this film, but I wouldn’t want to watch it again–unless I had the opportunity to see it on an enormous movie screen. I’d do that in a heartbeat.