Around the World in 80 Days (1956 film)

Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow presents an onscreen prologue, featuring footage from A Trip to the Moon (1902) film made by Georges Méliès, explaining that it is based loosely on the book From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne. Also included is the launching of an unmanned rocket and footage of the earth receding. In 1872, an English gentleman Phileas Fogg claims he can circumnavigate the world in eighty days. Met with scepticism, he makes a £20,000 wager (worth about £ today) with four fellow members of the Reform Club (each contributing £5,000 to the bet) that he can make the journey and arrive back at the club eighty days from exactly 8:45 pm that evening. Together with his resourceful French valet, Passepartout, Fogg goes hopscotching around the globe generously spending money to encourage others to help him get to his destinations faster so he can accommodate tight steamship schedules. Having reached Paris they hear that a tunnel under the Alps is blocked. The Thomas Cook agent who assists them offers to hire or sell them his gas-filled balloon. Fogg buys it and they fly over the Alps drinking champagne. Blown off-course, the two accidentally end up in Spain, where we see a table-top flamenco sequence performed in a bar. Later, Passepartout engages in a comic bullfight. Next, they go to Brindisi in Italy. Meanwhile, back in London, suspicion grows that Fogg has stolen £55,000 (around £ today) from the Bank of England so Police Inspector Fix is sent out by Scotland Yard to trail him (starting in Suez) but must keep waiting for a warrant to arrive so he can arrest Fogg in the British-controlled ports they visit. In India, Fogg and Passepartout rescue a beautiful young widow Aouda from being forced into a funeral pyre with her late husband. The three then travel to Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, and the Wild West (including the Sioux Nation, one was peaceful and the other are fearsome). Reaching New York by their man-made sailing railcar, they arrange their passage on a cargo steamship travelling to Venezuela – Fogg bribes the captain to go to England. Alas, they run out of coal mid-ocean and the ship stops. Fogg buys the ship and then instructs the crew to take everything that burns, including lifeboats, to provide fuel. They arrive in Liverpool, where, still with just enough time left to travel to London and win his wager, Fogg is promptly arrested by the diligent yet misguided Inspector Fix. Detaining Fogg at the police station, the embarrassed Fix discovers that the real culprit has already been apprehended by police in Brighton. Although Fogg is exculpated and free to go, he now has insufficient time to reach London before his deadline, and so has lost everything but the enduring love of the winsome Aouda. Upon returning to London, Fogg asks Passepartout to arrange a church wedding for the next day, Monday. Salvation comes when Passepartout is shocked to be informed that the next day is actually Sunday. Fogg then realizes that by traveling east towards the rising sun and crossing the International Date Line, he has gained a day. Thus, there is still just enough time to reach the Reform Club and win the bet. Fogg rushes to the club, arriving just before the 8:45 pm chime. Passepartout and Aouda then arrive behind him, inadvertently shocking everyone, as no woman has ever entered the Reform Club before. ==Cast==

• David Niven as Phileas Fogg • Cantinflas as Passepartout • Shirley MacLaine as Princess Aouda • Robert Newton as Inspector Fix Cameo appearances • Edward R. Murrow as the prologue narrator • Finlay Currie as Andrew Stuart, Reform Club member • Robert Morley as Gauthier Ralph, Reform Club member and Bank of England Governor • Ronald Squire as a Reform Club member • Basil Sydney as a Reform Club member • Noël Coward as Roland Hesketh-Baggott, London employment agency manager • Sir John Gielgud as Foster, Fogg's former valet • Trevor Howard as Denis Fallentin, Reform Club member • Harcourt Williams as Hinshaw, a Reform Club steward • Martine Carol as a girl in the Paris railway station • Fernandel as a Paris coachman • Charles Boyer as Monsieur Gasse, balloonist • Evelyn Keyes as a Paris flirt • Jose Greco & Troupe as a flamenco dancer • Luis Dominguin as a bullfighter • Gilbert Roland as Achmed Abdullah • Cesar Romero as Abdullah's henchman • Alan Mowbray as the British Consul at Suez • Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Sir Francis Cromarty • Melville Cooper as Mr. Talley, steward on the RMS Rangoon • Reginald Denny as a Bombay police inspector • Ronald Colman as a Great Indian Peninsular Railway official • Robert Cabal as an elephant driver-guide • Charles Coburn as a Hong Kong steamship company clerk • Peter Lorre as a steward on the SS Carnatic • George Raft as the bouncer of the Barbary Coast Saloon • Red Skelton as a drunk at the saloon • Marlene Dietrich as the saloon hostess • John Carradine as Col. Stamp Proctor of San Francisco • Frank Sinatra as the saloon pianist • Buster Keaton as a train conductor (San Francisco to Fort Kearney) • Col. Tim McCoy as a US Cavalry Colonel • Joe E. Brown as the Fort Kearney stationmaster • Andy Devine as the first mate of the SS Henrietta • Edmund Lowe as the engineer of the SS Henrietta • Victor McLaglen as the helmsman of the SS Henrietta • Jack Oakie as the Captain of the SS Henrietta • Beatrice Lillie as a London revivalist leader • John Mills as a London carriage driver • Glynis Johns as a Sporting Lady • Hermione Gingold as a Sporting Lady • A. E. Matthews as a Reform Club member • Ronald Adam as a Reform Club steward • Walter Fitzgerald as a Reform Club member • Frank Royde as a clergyman • Frederick Leister as a Reform Club member (uncredited) • Mike Mazurki as a Hong Kong drunk (uncredited) • Richard Wattis as Inspector Hunter of Scotland Yard (uncredited) • Keye Luke as an old man at Yokohama travel office (uncredited) • Felix Felton as a Reform Club member (uncredited) • Philip Ahn as Hong Kong citizen (uncredited) • Marion Ross (uncredited) • James Dime ==Production==

Around the World in 80 Days was produced by Broadway showman Michael Todd, based on a musical by Orson Welles and Jules Verne's adventure novel. Todd had never before produced a film. Spain, Thailand, and Japan. According to Time magazine's review of the film, 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, 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 of orange-coloured dye for those extras. Todd sometimes used models of boats, ships, and trains in the film, but he often decided that they did not look realistic so he switched to the real thing where he could. The scene of a collapsing train bridge is partly without models. The overhead shot of a train crossing a bridge was full scale, but the bridge collapse was a large-scale miniature, verifiable by observing the slightly jerky motion of the rear passenger car as the train pulls away, as well as the slowed-down water droplets which are out of scale in the splashing river below. All the steamships shown in the first half are miniatures shot in an outdoor studio tank. The exception is the American ship shown at the intermission point, which is real. The "American" ship is the Japanese training barque Kaiwo Maru. A tunnel was built for a train sequence out of paper mache. After the train filming was complete, the "tunnel" was pushed over into the gorge. Many of the special effects are described and pictured in a 1956 Popular Mechanics article. The scenes of the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by steamship took place off San Francisco and were shot on a specially built prop steamer, a converted barge mocked up to resemble a small ocean-going steamship, with mock paddles driven by the electric motor from an old streetcar. In his memoirs, Niven described the whole thing as being dangerously unstable (though stability improved as it was dismantled as though to feed it into its own furnaces as the plot required). One of the most famous sequences in the film, the flight by hydrogen balloon, is not in the original Jules Verne novel. Because the film was made in Todd-AO, the sequence was expressly created to show off the locations seen on the flight, as projected on the giant curved screen used for the process. A similar balloon flight can be found in an earlier Jules Verne novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, in which the protagonists explore Africa from a hydrogen balloon. Many of the balloon scenes with Niven and Cantinflas were filmed using a crane. Even that height bothered Niven, who was afraid of heights. Tom Burges, who was shorter than Niven, was used as a stand-in for scenes where the balloon is seen from a distance. Many of the lots used in the film are now on the land occupied by Century City, an office complex in the Los Angeles area. In his memoirs, Niven related that Todd completed filming while in considerable debt. The post-production work on the film was an exercise in holding off Todd's creditors long enough to produce a saleable film, and the footage was worked upon under the supervision of Todd's creditors and returned to a secure vault each night, as if it were in escrow. The film's release and subsequent success vindicated Todd's considerable efforts. ==Release==

The film premiered on October 17, 1956, at the Rivoli Theater in New York City It topped Variety monthly box office chart for seven months during 1957. In the Spanish and Latin American posters and programs for the movie, Cantinflas is billed above the other players because he was very popular in Spanish-speaking countries. There were two souvenir programmes sold in theatres. For Roadshow screenings Todd-AO is mentioned, though for general release those pages are not contained in the book. The programme was created by Todd's publicist, Art Cohn, who died in the plane crash with him. His biography, The Nine Lives of Michael Todd, was published after their deaths which put a macabre spin on the title. ==Reception==

Critical response Bosley Crowther called the film a "sprawling conglomeration of refined English comedy, giant-screen travel panoramics and slam-bang Keystone burlesque" and wrote that Todd and the film's crew "commandeered the giant screen and stereophonic sound as though they were Olsen and Johnson turned loose in a cosmic cutting-room, with a pipe organ in one corner and all the movies ever made to toss around". Time magazine called it "brassy, extravagant, long-winded and funny" and the "Polyphemus of productions", writing "as a travelogue, Around the World is at least as spectacular as anything Cinerama has slapped together". Time highlighted the performance of "the famous Mexican comic, Cantinflas [who in] his first U.S. movie ... gives delightful evidence that he may well be, as Charles Chaplin once said he was, 'the world's greatest clown'." Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively collected 43 reviews and gave the film an aggregate score of 72%, with an average rating of 6/10, with the site's consensus stating: "It's undeniably shallow, but its cheerful lack of pretense -- as well as its grand scale and star-stuffed cast -- help make Around the World in 80 Days charmingly light-hearted entertainment." The development of the film and the personal life of actor Mario Moreno during that time were dramatized later in the 2014 film Cantinflas. Accolades The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning five (including Best Picture), beating out critically and publicly praised films: Friendly Persuasion, Giant, The King and I and The Ten Commandments. It is also one of the few Best Picture winners not to be nominated in any acting category. Although not nominated for Best Original Song, the film's theme song "Around the World" (music by Victor Young; later lyricised by Harold Adamson), became very popular. It was a hit for Bing Crosby in 1957, and was a staple of the easy-listening genre for many years: "Around the world, I searched for you / I traveled on when hope was gone to keep a rendezvous ... No more will I go all around the world / For I have found my world in you." The film was screened at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, but was not entered into the main competition. Anniversary celebration are seen here at home in a film clip which was used for the television special. On the first anniversary of the film's release, Todd threw a party at the Madison Square Garden attended by 18,000 people; Time magazine called the party a "spectacular flop" though Todd shrugged off the remark, saying, "You can't say it was a little bust." ==Distribution and ownership==

The film was originally distributed by United Artists in two Todd-AO 70 mm versions, one for Todd-AO 70 mm release at 30 frames per second, and an alternative 70 mm version at 24 frames per second reduced to 35 mm for general release. The original Todd-AO 70mm running time without the extra music was 179 minutes. However, after the Chicago showing Todd cut four minutes out of the Western sequence where Cantinflas is pursued by Indians. The 70mm print shown at The Rivoli theatre in NYC was 175 minutes. However, the original 35mm Technicolor/anamorphic magnetic stereo and mono optical prints ran the complete 179 minutes with the chase scene intact. Although the leaders on the optical sound prints were labelled for Perspecta directional encoding, the prints do not contain the signal and were standard mono. In 1968, additional cuts were made including removing most of the prologue with the changing aspect ratios. Only a brief few shots with Edward R. Murrow remained and the entire "Trip to the Moon" clips were cut. Since the opening shot of Murrow was 1.33 window boxed in the wide frame, they had to crop and blow up that shot for the 2.35 ratio which made it very grainy. The intermission was also cut for the 1968 re-release which included the freeze frame of the ship and fade into the second half. The reels just jump cut with an awkward sound gap between the first and second half. The chase scene was missing from this version too which reduced the running time to 167 minutes. However, some uncut 179-minute 35mm Technicolor prints were struck too which meant at least some theatres played the Roadshow version even though the vast majority showed the shorter cut. 35mm IB/Scope copies of both versions exist from 1968. The 24 frames per second 70mm prints were also the 167-minute version in that year too. As a publicity stunt, Todd Jr. called the press when he removed a 70mm copy from a bank vault claiming it had been stored there since 1956 for safe keeping and was being shown at a theatre again. The copy they exhibited was the cut re-issue 167-minute version. Around 1976, after its last network television broadcast on CBS, United Artists lost control of the film to Elizabeth Taylor, who was the widow of producer Michael Todd and had inherited a portion of Todd's estate. In 1983, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the film from Taylor, and reissued the film theatrically in a re-edited 143-minute version (this version would subsequently air only once on Turner Classic Movies, this was before any restoration on the movie was announced). In the years that followed, a pan-and-scan transfer of the alternative 24 frame/s version (presented at its full 183-minute length) was shown on cable television. In 2004, Warner Bros. issued a digitally restored version of the 24 frame/s incarnation on DVD, also at its full 183-minute length, but also including the original intermission, Entr'acte, and exit music segments that were a part of the original 1956 theatrical release, and for the first time on home video at its original 2.2:1 aspect widescreen ratio. This restored version was reconstructed from the best available elements of the 24 frame/s edition Warner Bros. could find, and was subsequently shown on Turner Classic Movies. The original elements from the 30 frame/s/70 mm Todd-AO version (as well as the original prints derived from these elements) still exist, albeit in faded condition due to the passage of time, but remain to be formally restored by Warner Bros. There is some missing footage in the India train ride where the image artificially fades in and out to compensate for the missing shots. Warner Bros. retained Andy Pratt Film Labs who in conjunction with Eastman Kodak developed a method to remove the cracked and faded-to-brown, clear lacquer from the original 65 mm Technicolor negative. Warners did nothing further to restore the negative. Due to costs of making a 70 mm release print even without magnetic striping, using DTS disk for audio, there are no immediate plans for any new prints. The 65 mm roadshow print negative was used for the DVD release. Had any 35 mm Anamorphic elements been used the aspect ratio would have been 2.35:1. Mike Todd had limited 35 mm anamorphic prints made with a non-standard compression ratio to provide a 2.21:1 viewing experience. These special 35 mm prints are called Cinestage, the same name of Mike Todd's showcase theatre in Chicago. Best available prints of the 30 frame/s/70 mm version have recently been exhibited in revival movie houses worldwide. As of the present time, Warner Bros. remains the film's rights holder. ==Soundtrack and home media==

The soundtrack was commercially released on vinyl and audio tape. Two CD versions were released as well, including a digital remastering of the original Decca album on MCA in the 1980s and an expanded version with extra tracks on the Hit Parade Records label in Canada in 2007. There was also a model kit from Adams of the balloon, a board game, and a Dell Comics adaptation. A Cantinflas puppet was released separately, dressed in an outfit similar to the Passepartout costume. The DVDs for Around the World in 80 Days include four hours of supplemental material, in addition to the restored three-hour wide-screen presentation. Included on one of the disks is a documentary film, about 50 minutes long, about Michael Todd. ==Theme parks==

Alton Towers theme park in England had a dark boat ride based on the film operating between 1981 and 1993. Worlds of Fun theme park in Kansas City, Missouri was inspired by the book and film. "Worlds of Fun was designed to take visitors on a global adventure, featuring themed areas representing different parts of the world, such as Scandinavia, Africa, Europa, East Asia, and Americana." A model of the steamboat Henrietta was built and operated as the entrance to the park during its first twenty years. ==See also==