Around the World in Eighty Days (1956): Eitan's Take

Around the World in 80 Days is the first Best Picture winner, to my recollection, to be filmed in both Technicolor and beautiful panoramic widescreen and boy does it earn that distinction. Though it's an imperfect film, it's so abundantly imaginative and exciting that, like the Greatest Show on Earth, it's hard to hate it. However, with its charming British wit and its adventurous cinematography, it clearly goes places -- both tangibly and narratively -- that the Greatest Show on Earth could never even dream of doing. By the end, I'd concluded that it's not quite a deserving Best Picture winner, but it's a classic that should have a place among the world's great global capers (It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, etc.).

David Niven has the perfect gravitas to play Phileas Fogg, who is a rather one-dimensional character, and Cantinflas is positively delightful as right-hand man Passepartout. The situations they get into are, of course, absurd -- floating over the Alps (and grabbing snow to cool their champagne), bullfighting in Spain, rescuing a princess from the horrific practice of Sati in India, evading Scotland Yard detectives, riding steamboats to Hong Kong and Yokohama and San Francisco, getting into a ridiculous 30 minute steampunk train fight with a gang of wild Sioux, etc. But it all makes for a rather wondrous journey, at times quaint, riveting, mysterious, and genuinely pulse-quickening. Some of the sequences are so dense and so epic, that you can forget that you're not just watching a full-length movie about the Wild West or a steamboat journey or an elephant adventure through the forests of India.

But two things must be said: first, this is merely a VERY LARGE BUDGET adaptation of the work of one of the world's greatest science fiction novelists, so it's not as though story credit can truly go to the people who made the book a reality. And second, you might as well watch it on mute, as it must be one of the most visually sumptuous films to come out of the 50's. The cinematography is done by Lionel Lindon, who also photographed episodes of the richly textured television seriesAlfred Hitchcock Presents... as well as Rod Serling's dark noir Night Gallery. Watching this movie using the digital projector in my bedroom was a great treat. The colors leap off of the screen, and many of the great vistas could have just gone on forever. A truly beautiful color film, with unique and exciting international scenes, that provides an easy counterpoint to the dark (and also brilliant) B&W cinematography of On the Waterfront. You could easily mistake this movie with films from the 60's that were shot with much better technology.

This delightful, if a little empty-headed, G-rated romp earns a 7/10. As a movie. As a Best Picture winner, I think most would agree it falls short of greatness. But if you don't have a place in your heart for a movie this FUN, I don't know what to say.

Great cameos, by the way.