I posted recently about how the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days played a role in explaining the sudden popping into my mind of the actor-singer Gracie Fields. As a boy I had read and enjoyed Jules Verne’s 1873 book of the same name on which the film is based but had not seen the film when it came out, presumably because I was too young. In those days in Sri Lanka, if you did not see a film during its first run release, it was pretty much gone forever.
So I decided to watch it now. It is a long and extravagant film done on a large scale, lasting about three hours. David Niven is perfect in the role of the fastidious and punctilious Phileas Fogg who makes a bet for £20,000 with four members of his stuffy mens-only London club that he can go around the world in 80 days. Cantinflas plays his valet Passepartout and provides most of the comedy. He actually dominates the film, seemingly having more screen time than Niven. He has the dress, stature, and some of the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin and the facial expressions of Chico Marx. There are about 40 famous international actors making cameo appearances and about 70,000 extras from around the world. It was done in a widescreen format.
Filming took place in late 1955, from August 9 to December 20. The crew worked fast (75 actual days of filming), producing 680,000 feet (210,000 m) of film, which was edited down to 25,734 feet (7,844 m) of finished film. The picture cost just under $6 million to make, employing 112 locations in 13 countries and 140 sets. Todd said he and the crew visited every country portrayed in the picture, including England, France, India, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Spain, Thailand, and Japan. According to Time magazine’s review of the film, the cast, including extras, totaled 68,894 people; it also featured 7,959 animals, “including four ostriches, six skunks, 15 elephants, 17 fighting bulls, 512 rhesus monkeys, 800 horses, 950 burros, 2,448 American buffalo, 3,800 Rocky Mountain sheep and a sacred cow that eats flowers on cue”. There is also a cat at the Reform Club. The wardrobe department spent $410,000 to provide 74,685 costumes and 36,092 trinkets. This is allegedly the most costumes ever required for a Hollywood production.
Some 10,000 extras were used in filming the bullfight scene in Spain, with Cantinflas as the matador; Cantinflas had previously done some bullfighting. They used all 6,500 residents of a small Spanish town called Chinchón, 45 kilometres (28 mi) from Madrid, but Todd decided there were not enough spectators, so he found 3,500 more from nearby towns. He used 650 Indians for a fight on a train in the West. Many were indeed Indians, but some were Hollywood extras. All 650 had their skin color altered with dye. Todd used about 50 US gallons (190 L; 42 imp gal) of orange-coloured dye for those extras.
The film is mostly a travelogue with extended sequences showing the countryside in various places. It was made at a time when travel abroad was a rare luxury and so it took the opportunity to take the viewer along on a trip, showing the natural beauties of the world, in a balloon ride over Europe and in train rides across India and the US. These are quite gorgeous and one can understand how it would have provided riveting viewing for audiences in 1956.
Unfortunately when it spends time in specific places, it shows the locals as stereotypes, even caricatures, in ways that we would now see as offensive. All of the locals are dressed in traditional outfits, such as Japanese women all dressed in kimonos and looking like geishas and the Japanese men all wearing the traditional tunics and having the single braid. Spain is represented by people in colorful dresses doing flamenco dances and there is a long bullfight sequence. In India, we see Passepartout rescuing a princess (played by Shirley McLaine) from being thrown on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Everywhere there are white actors in brownface playing Asians and Native Americans. Few cliches are spared when it comes to Native Americans. There are scenes of them in traditional garb with full headgear, smoking peace pipes, doing war dances, and attacking a train with war whoops and brandishing tomahawks. They are even referred to as ‘redskins’. Mercifully, they do not solemnly lift up a palm and say ‘How’ in greeting. We even have the US cavalry riding to the rescue of Passepartout who is being burnt at the stake after being captured by the Sioux.
The one time the stereotype is broken is when in Yokohama, Phileas Fogg asks a question of an old man on the street who is, of course, dressed in traditional Japanese style. Fogg speaks to him the way that English speakers often do when meeting someone whom they assume does not speak English, by using broken English. The man replies in perfect English with an Oxbridge accent.
It is an old-fashioned film, aimed at family audiences, rich in color and moving at a leisurely pace. There is no violence and no suspense (of the frightening sort) so can be seen by people of all ages. While enjoyable, its main drawback is that it has not aged well in the way it depicts people of other countries and cultures.
Here is the trailer.
Being in the local theater watching the first run of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ (1956) is my earliest memory. I was two.
😉
I really love that movie.
Japanese men with braids???
Recently, I watched the TV adaptation with David Tennant. Excellent stuff.
there was a version with jackie chan as passepartout that is probably not worth shit, that should be mentioned for completeness. i don’t think the raw idea there is wrong -- chan was influenced by chaplin, it’s the kind of thing he’s always done -- but western kiddie shit just sux.
i never saw the whole thing of the niven version, just a few snippets. my best memory of the story is reading a kiddie edit of it with glossary terms in the sidebar when i was elevenish. there were nice illustrations. i was just starting to get romantic feelings and the part about rescuing the girl from suttee and taking her with you, that was real cool to me. how often did sati happen in real life? was it a reasonable thing to emphasize about a culture, as an outsider in an imperial culture? but it caught the imagination big-time.
what i didn’t notice in the book was passepartout doing all the derring-do. at least, i don’t remember it. puts a kind of amusing sheen on the story. the hero doesn’t do the heroics, has his man do it. and yet, still the hero. of what? it was a real adventure. it’d be cool to see a version with respectful views of the various cultures.
you could even be set upon by somewhat stereotypical villains in those places, sometimes, right? foreigner shows up in japan, gets rolled by the yakuza, nicer locals help out. makes sense. just gotta have civilized self-possessed people be shown with human dignity. not exactly rocket surgery.
Try the recent miniseries with David Tennant as Fogg.
BTW, how many people here realise that “Passepartout” is an in-joke, because in French it means “skeleton key”, which allows you togo anywhere?
Bébé Mélange @5:
Try this;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_80_Days_(2021_TV_series)
i just might, thx
While filled with stereotypes and an often overabundance of traditional costuming/sets/situations for the setting of 1872, this is still a film I can watch over and over. I’ve read the book a few times, and my wife and I recently watched the David Tennant BBC production. I have not watched the Jackie Chan version, and don’t really have any desire to do so.
The original novel was quite short and did not have the bull-fighting seen. That was added in the film to showcase Cantinflas, who was one of the most popular Mexican actors/comedians, but not well know in the US when the film was made. Although, IIRC, in the novel it is Passepartout who recuses the princess as shown in the movie.
I think what makes this such an enjoyable movie for me to watch is the creativity Fogg demonstrates when an obstacle arises. Now, to be sure, the solution is usually reached by Passepartout pulling money out of the inexhaustible carpetbag, but whether the solution is buying an elephant or a steamship, Fogg always manages to keep forging ahead. The Tennant version eventually expresses the same doggedness, but only after a good deal of character development. While the Verne Fogg was a mature self-reliant man, to the point of being dismissive of his surroundings, the Tennent Fogg had to gain that assurance and self-reliance by being at times pushed, goaded, pitied, guilted, and sometimes threatened to continue his journey. A very different treatment, but at the same time, very well done.
For those who enjoy the 1970’s SF style, Philip Jose Farmer had a series of books, called the Wold Newton series, wherein famous literary heroes were really agents of competing immortal alien races who have granted their human followers tremendous strength and longevity. In one of the books of this series, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s novel is explained as a confrontation between Phileas Fogg as an agent for one of the races and Captain Nemo as an agent for the other. It’s all in good fun, although very dated. Whether intentional because he was writing a pastiche of Verne, or inadvertent and due to his age/upbringing, there will be some aspects of these novels which will irritate modern readers. At the same time, Farmer is quite creative and writes reasonably well (although there is a lot of influence from the pulps in this novel). As a warning, or an enticement, these books have an above average amount of sex and violence. Not as much as some of Farmer’s other works, but these are not a Heinlein juvenile.