Is Around the World in 80 Days a good movie? The more I look at it, the more I think it isn't. Artistically it is all over the shop and strikes me as the sort of thing that a bunch of 3-year-olds on crack would do if they had the relevant skills. Look! It's Cantinflas! (who?) and John Gielgud in the same scene! Now it's a travelogue and they're in France, headed to Spain by accident. Let's have Jose Greco do some flamenco and Gilbert Roland will save the day after the bull ring! Doesn't Robert Newton know that David Niven is a good guy? Nice music! I didn't know Shirley Maclaine was Indian. Nice picture of a dhow at sunset! Who's that guy, daddy? Watch Buster Keaton run the train over the bridge just before it collapses. Why does Passepartoute never mention to his boss that Fix intends to arrest him, first chance he gets? Hey! Elephants!And so on and so on. It's exhausting, like trying to keep a box score on three baseball games while you're in a boxing match. Verne knew this when he was writing the novel. He knew his inexplicable (to the French) clockwork Englishman, the sort who doesn't have any training, but nonetheless goes out and does the impossible on a whim was unstoppable, except by another Englishman. Otherwise, the whole thing turns into a travelogue in which Fogg overcomes the random, feeble efforts of nature and man to stop him, and the surprise ending. Until then, there really isn't much of interest going on. Until Fix shows up, it's all straightforward and dull. Hey look! It's Ronald Colman and Bea Lillie! Thing is, they distract you from all that, with the pictures and cameos. It's great spectacle. It's just not a particularly good movie.

As a kid I really enjoyed Michael Anderson's Around the World in Eighty Days, it looked spectacular fun with a lot of stars popping in.Watching the film some years later, it really is an overlong mess and the silliness is hard to overlook.The film however does look gorgeous, it is beautifully photographed, filled with countless star cameos, many of them who are now forgotten. The film is helped by some wonderful location shooting, this is certainly not just the Universal back-lotDavid Niven is effortless as Phileas Fogg who has to circumnavigate the world in 80 days in order to win a wager. Cantinflas is just OK as his servant and comic relief, Passepartout who seems to constantly slow Fogg down with his overlong routines such as the bullfight in Spain that just goes on and on.

Everyone enjoys taking a cheap shot at the Academy Awards, and this movie offers a great chance to do just that - Around the World in Eighty Days won Best Picture, while in the same year John Ford's The Searchers, one of the most iconic classics in the history of American cinema, didn't receive a single nomination.Around the World is three hours long, and feels like it. Every few minutes the movie stops to gawk at its exotic locations and smugly chuckle at its endless celebrity cameos ("Look, isn't it funny that the saloon pianist is Frank Sinatra?"). It has certainly aged badly. I remember enjoying it as a kid thirty years ago; rewatching it recently, I was surprised by how overlong it feels. I had a similar reaction to another on-the-road adventure/comedy of the same era, The Great Race, except the latter is propelled even today by Jack Lemmon's villainous glee as Professor Fate and by the sight of the adorable Natalie Wood in her lingerie. Around the World features also-adorable Shirley MacLaine - but, distractingly, she is unlikely cast as an Indian princess.Overall, though, this Jules Verne adaptation isn't a bad movie - a mildly entertaining travelogue with luscious vistas and a tone-perfect David Niven as a British gentleman so prim and fastidious that, if you tossed a couple of eggs in his luggage, two minutes later he would produce from it still immaculate clothes and a perfectly cooked omelet on a silver platter. In fact, Around the World is at its best when it focuses on Niven's Phileas Fogg dryly dealing with annoyances, obstacles and threats, and at its worst when it pauses to showcase the physical skills of co-star Cantinflas as Passepartout - so we have a dancing number, a bullfighting number, a circus number, and so on.The result is drawn-out; we complain that Peter Jackson added at least a whole hour of bloat in each Hobbit movie, but Hollywood was already doing that sixty years ago.6/10

Jules Verne is often thought of today as a pioneering author of science- fiction, but his "Around the World in 80 Days" is a novel without any futuristic, sci-fi elements. Rather than attempting to predict the technology of the future, Verne uses the novel to celebrate the technology of his own day, especially the railways and steamships which were starting to make the world a smaller place. Even so, he still thought that his hero was attempting the impossible; it is said that his original title was "Around the World in 100 Days", but he changed it when his publisher pointed out that a tour of the world in 100 days was quite feasible so Fogg would not have found any takers for his bet. The basic plot is quite a simple one. In order to win a bet with fellow- members of his London club Phileas Fogg, a Victorian English gentleman, sets out to travel around the world in eighty days, accompanied by his valet Passepartout. Along the way they have various adventures. Their principal antagonist is a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Fix, who dogs their footsteps in order to arrest Fogg, whom he believes to have robbed the Bank of England. (In reality, Fogg is the victim of mistaken identity). Fogg's love interest is Princess Aouda, a beautiful Indian lady whom he rescues from the fate of being burned alive on her first husband's funeral pyre. The film contains two odd pieces of casting. In the fifties the Production Code still officially banned depictions of mixed-race romances and marriages, but in practice the censors tended to overlook romances between white men and light-skinned non-white or mixed-race women, provided those women were played by white actresses. (E.g. Jennifer Jones in "Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing", Joan Rice in "His Majesty O'Keeffe", Ava Gardner in "Bhowani Junction", and others). Hence the seemingly bizarre casting of a young Shirley MacLaine as Aouda, although she is not quite as unconvincing as an Indian as one might have expected. Hollywood's squeamishness about interracial love did not die with the Production Code; when the film was remade in 2004 Aouda was written out of the story altogether and Fogg's love interest became a Frenchwoman. The second strange piece of casting is that of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout, a Frenchman in the novel. (Mind you, this role was even more strangely cast in the 2004 version when Passepartout was played by Jackie Chan). The reason is that the producer Mike Todd was a great admirer of Cantinflas, and the plot of the novel was even rewritten to accommodate him. Comic mock-bullfights were a Cantinflas speciality, and in the film Fogg and Passepartout travel to Spain, a country they do not actually visit in the book, so that such a scene can take place. Real bullfighting is a nasty, bloody business, but in the hands of Cantinflas it becomes a genteel, balletic affair, a sort of tango between man and bull who clearly have a gentleman's agreement not to injure one another. Although little known in English-speaking countries, Cantinflas was a huge star in Mexico and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, where he was given top billing ahead of David Niven. The film could perhaps be described as "Around the World in 80 Clichés", because each country the travellers visit is represented by a sort of easily recognisable visual shorthand- flamenco and bullfights in Spain, fezzes in Egypt, elephants, sacred cows and turbans in India, rickshaws and pigtails in Hong Kong, kimonos and temples in Japan, cowboys and Indians in America. No expense was spared in making the film; the cast and crew actually did travel round the world, shooting the various scenes on location in the countries where they are set, and a large number of established stars, including the likes of John Gielgud, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra, have cameo roles or appear as extras. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. This caused some surprise at the time because it beat films as good as "The Ten Commandments" and "Lust for Life". There seemed, however, to be a tradition in the fifties of giving "Best Picture" Oscars to light- hearted films ("An American in Paris", "Gigi") as well as to serious ones ("From Here to Eternity", "On the Waterfront", "Ben-Hur"), and "Around the World in Eighty Days" falls firmly into the former category. It was a big success at the box office, and the Academy judges were obviously impressed by the factors that made it so- its grand scale, its attractive Technicolor photography, Niven's suave, dapper performance as the hero, the antics of Cantinflas and its general sense of fun and adventure. Although it would not have been my personal choice as best film of 1956, I cannot regard it as an unworthy winner. 8/10Some goofs. When Fogg arrives back at his club at 8.45 pm on 21st September it is broad daylight outside, although it would be dark in Britain at this time in late September, and would have been even darker in 1872 when there was no British Summer Time. We see a San Francisco cable car, although these were not introduced until 1873, a year after the date the film is set.