(Pre-prepared to cover for a trip)
If it weren't for a couple of things, this would be one of the greatest adaptations to be filmed, but it's not. Every Jules Verne adaptation seems to founder bizarrely, caught on the rocky shoals of production or conception. This one, to get the bad out of the way early, seems to have taken Spanish funding and inserted a freshly fabricated sequence involving a balloon and landing mistakenly in Spain that lasts for about forty minutes of the one hundred and seventy minutes. Almost an entire quarter of a movie based in racing around the world in record time is stuck in Spain, doing practically nothing and messing around with bulls! It's infuriating! Utterly infuriating! The movie bombs in that first hour after a very encouraging beginning, and then doesn't pick up until afterward, when presumably most people have given up and gone back to counting their fingers or watching the wallpaper.
It's doubly infuriating since the movie sticks very closely to the original adventure after the interlude the air and Spain, and is actually very well made, pretty and watchable after it completes the transition back to the properly adapted story. Alas, sometimes that's how movies were made. The introduction of legendary Mexican star Cantinflas as a suddenly Spanish servant Passepartout, (originally French) results in a huge amount of time spent on showcasing his talents in the Spanish sequence, annoying a lot of viewers in the process, and undermining his excellent work later when he's treated as a regular character. Oh, the movie of two parts... If only, if only.
That's enough of the bad. The remainder of the film, which can be accessed easily by skipping the aforementioned Spanish sequence, is pretty solid. It omits some portions of the travel, and instead concentrates on certain passages. For example, they skip directly from the place of cinematic doom to Suez, and miss out everything between, but do reproduce the story of the novel whenever they choose to keep a sequence. The music is very patriotic and lampoons the stuffiness of David Niven's hero, the dispassionate Phileas Fogg, as much as Verne did in his prose. 'Around The World In Eighty Days' wasn't an entirely serious work, after all. It was meant to be humorous. It's also fast paced once you get into the good part, and David Niven is brilliantly subdued as the great traveller. A very young Shirley Maclaine is oddly cast as an Indian princess, but doesn't do badly with what she's given. Robert Newton is funny, but a bit too caricatured as Detective Fix, the policeman tacked on to Fogg's party, who is intent on arresting him once he reaches his home country once again.
Apart from the sheer length of the movie, the music, the brilliant photography and production values, a great closing credit sequence by Saul Bass, and a very odd production story that includes Orson Welles going bankrupt from the stage version, the most notable aspect of this film is the ridiculous number of high profile cameo appearance. The movie is stuffed with notable actors and performers popping up for a few seconds, and almost buries itself under the burden of featuring them all. However, ultimately it does benefit from the accumulated star power. David Niven is lovely, and caught the comedic moments perfectly when they come his way.
It's a good film, if you know what not to watch. If only it had been two hours long instead of three, then it would have been great. Go ahead, give it a try, but forward through that bizarre addition and save yourself an hour. There are no balloons in the original story. It's a nice experience, which lovely trains and ships.
O.
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