Mike Todd’s three-hour Jules Verne is handsome, amiable and generous with its cameos, and David Niven is exactly the man for Fogg. It is also a travelogue with a wager attached, and somewhere over the Pacific it stops being a film and becomes a slideshow.
Mike Todd was a showman before he was a producer, and Around the World in 80 Days is a showman’s film: Jules Verne’s 1873 novel taken as a licence to visit as many countries as the budget allowed and to put a famous face at every stop. Four writers are credited on the screenplay, S.J. Perelman, James Poe and John Farrow alongside Verne himself, and Michael Anderson directs. It opens with a prologue built around Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, an old silent film about a journey, and then the screen widens and the colour comes in. Todd wanted a spectacle, and for a long while he has one. It is handsome and it is an hour too long.
David Niven is the reason it works at all. His Phileas Fogg is dry, exact and untroubled by anything the world can throw at him, and Perelman gives him lines to match, small deflations delivered without looking up. Niven does almost nothing and it is exactly right; the joke of the film is that the globe is spinning round a man who declines to be impressed by it. Cantinflas, as Passepartout, is the opposite, all elbows and eyebrows, and his bullring sequence in Spain is the best physical comedy in the picture, a long stretch in front of a crowd where he is given room to work and takes all of it.
Lionel Lindon’s photography is what the money bought, and it was well spent. The balloon over the French countryside, the Indian plains seen from a train, the American West with a herd of buffalo across the tracks: he shoots them from far back and lets the frame fill, and at that width you can see what the size was for. Ken Adam’s London is all fog, brass and club leather. Victor Young’s score does more for the film’s mood than most of its stars, a waltz that turns up wherever they land and makes the whole thing feel like one long afternoon out.
The cameos are the game, and some are worth the wait. Robert Newton, as Mr. Fix, is not a cameo but a proper performance, a policeman of red-faced conviction who follows Fogg across the world on a hunch he cannot prove; he has the film’s second-best comic role and knows how to play a man who is always one boat behind. Marlene Dietrich runs a San Francisco saloon and Frank Sinatra turns round from her piano once, which is his whole part. Buster Keaton is the conductor on the train west, and his one scene reminds you how much better he was at this sort of thing than anyone else on the screen. John Carradine, as Proctor Stamp, picks a quarrel with Fogg on that train. Finlay Currie and Robert Morley, as the whist partners, wait in London and harrumph.
Here is where we were. The balloon and the bull had us delighted, grinning at the nerve of it. Somewhere on the Pacific we realised we were looking at our watch more often than Fogg looked at his, and that the film had stopped noticing where it was. Three editors are credited, Paul Weatherwax, Gene Ruggiero and Howard Epstein, and between them they let it run to 182 minutes; a travelogue can afford that and a comedy cannot. Anderson directs each stop competently and none of them urgently. Shirley MacLaine, as Princess Aouda, is asked to be Indian and to be grateful, and manages the second, through no fault of her own; the casting was wrong in 1956 and time has not helped it.
It is a big, benign comedy with no interest in being sharp. The pleasure is in the scenery and the star-spotting, and both survive a small screen better than you would think, though at home the invitation to wander off and make tea is hard to resist. It carries a U, and children will love the balloon, the bull and the buffalo, and be asleep before Fogg reaches America, which is a sensible response. Stay awake for the last twenty minutes, which is where the wager finally remembers it is a plot.
