Reeling Backward: "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956)

Poor "Around the World in 80 Days." If it wasn't so burdened by that mantle of having won a Best Picture Academy Award, I think people would regard it much more fondly. Instead they'd see a fun, light piece of extravagant entertainment -- pure spectacle for its own sake.

When "World" does get mentioned these days, it's usually not too far from the words "worst Best Picture winner ever" or something to that effect. And indeed, while watching the picture I was rarely able to push that distinction out of my mind. It's a thoroughly engaging, fun movie with massive production values and featuring a host of movie stars in cameo roles -- many of them blink-and-you'll-miss-it fast, such as the piano player in an Old West saloon turning around to reveal Frank Sinatra's wordless profile.

But Best Picture? There's simply nothing about "World" that announces itself as Best Picture material. Its other competitors from 1956 were "The King and I," "The Ten Commandments," "Giant" and "Friendly Persuasion" -- not exactly an outstanding cinematic year, by most reckonings. Perhaps only 1952 beats it out for the weakest Academy Awards field ever, when "The Greatest Show on Earth" took the top prize.

"World" also won Oscars for cinematography and editing (both deserved) as well as screenplay and musical score. It was based on the Jules Verne book, with many changes and embellishments -- e.g., the sequence of the two men riding over the Alps in an air balloon, perhaps the most iconic image from the movie, is a total fabrication.

It tells the tale of straitlaced British adventurer Phileas Fogg, played by David Niven, who accepts a challenge from fellow members of the snooty Reform Club to travel around the world in 80 days, with 20,000 pounds wagered. In 1872, this is considered an astonishing feat. But Fogg, a stand-in for the futurist Verne himself, muses that it will be accomplished in 80 hours eventually.

Just a few days earlier, some bold criminal stole a fortune from the Bank of England, with Fogg the prime suspect. Certainly the way he throws money around on his trip -- purchasing and then discarding the balloon, an elephant and even a steamship -- suggests something nefarious. He spends far more than he could hope to win from his wager.

Thus Fix (Robert Newton in his final role), a police inspector, shadows Fogg most of the trip, perpetually waiting on a warrant to arrive in the right place so he can apprehend his supposed culprit. Of course, he could just hold him for questioning until the warrant arrives, but then we wouldn't have a movie.

Also coming along for half the trip is Shirley MacLaine as Indian (!) Princess Aouda, whom Fogg rescues from a ritual sacrifice ceremony. Aouda says and does astonishingly little for most of the trip, finally casting some doe eyes at Fogg near the end and, in what must have been shockingly funny in 1956, asking him to marry her. The porcelain-skinned MacLaine, slightly decorated with dusky makeup, is most unconvincing as a native denizen of the Near East.

Also along for the trip is Passepartout, Fogg's valet whom he just hired earlier the same day he sets off on his excursion. A former circus gymnast and jack-of-all-trades, Passepartout has an array of skills that come in handy throughout the trip, including playing at bullfighter for a reluctant benefactor. Fogg has run through his serving men at an astonishing pace because of their failure to meet his persnickety standards, but Passepartout is the unlikely one who measures up.

A mild-mannered ladies' man with patched trousers, mustachio tips and a bowler hat reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Passepartout is played by Mexican superstar Cantinflas, considered by man (including Chaplin) the greatest international clown of his era. Hollywood had been begging Cantinflas to make a movie with them for years, and he had always refused until "World," when he was in his mid-40s. He would make only a few more American pictures before returning to Mexican cinema.

Passepartout actually dominates the story for a good chunk of the narrative, playing the comedic protagonist while Fogg operates as the straight man. In fact, Niven received top billing only in English-speaking countries, while Cantinflas was billed as the lead everywhere else in the globe. (The casting would follow a similar theme for the film's underwhelming 2004 remake, with Jackie Chan as Passepartout and the relatively unknown Steve Coogan as Fogg.)

My favorite part was when Fogg is making the final leg of his journey across the Atlantic and the steamship runs out of coal. Niven buys the ship from the captain, and proceeds to have the crew tear apart every inch of the vessel that is flammable and toss it into the boiler. By the end they're riding on a floating barge with an engine room and a pair of wheel paddles, and not much else.

Directed by Michael Anderson with a screenplay adaptation by James Poe, John Farrow and S.J. Perelman, "Around the World in 80 Days" is light, carefree entertainment, filled with plenty of laughs and fun. All the cameos by stars end up seeming rather pointless, but there's no denying it's an engaging flick, even at a hair over three hours long.

Watching it got me to thinking about this year's Best Picture race. "Argo" had been considered an early front-runner for that award, but a growing backlash seemed to conclude that it was too unserious to be named Best Picture. Or, more accurately, that its story theme did not have the prerequisite "heaviness" to earn that distinction.

"Argo" is indeed a dramatic film, but it has plenty of moments of levity, with Alan Arkin's character as the nexus for the frivolity. The overall tone is of a crime caper -- a deadly serious one to be sure, but one in which we know the good guys get out of Iran safely.

"Lincoln" and "Zero Dark Thirty" are both more classic versions of a Best Picture pedigree -- historical dramas based on real figures, with a heavy spritz of Hollywood fact-fudging.

It's instructive that comedies have earned so few Best Picture nominations, let alone wins. "Annie Hall" and "Shakespeare in Love" are the only two to take the Academy Award in the past half-century, and both have plenty of serious moments that render them more of a dramatic-comedy blend.

In that sense I suppose we should be more appreciative of "Around the World in 80 Days," since it represented a genre that has not gotten its due respect from the Academy.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946)

I love the idea of "A Matter of Life and Death." It's the movie they actually made I'm not wild about.

David Niven plays a British bomber pilot who was supposed to die, but files an appeal in the court of heaven for more time. Stories of this kind are pretty familiar, from "A Guy Named Joe" to "Heaven Can Wait" to "Always." Even Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life" -- a criminally underrated film, in my humble opinion -- contains similar notes about an orderly afterlife, complete with a celestial, fallible bureaucracy and innocent souls striving against its capricious strictures.

It's a tantalizing notion, which is probably while filmmakers keep returning to it.

But this well-regarded film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- the writing/directing team better known as The Archers -- is a daffy, dippy rendering that ends up defending True Love as its central theme. The big court trial in heaven, which was what made me interested in seeing the movie in the first place, is a disappointing and bizarre affair in which British and American ideals are weighed against each other.

Niven plays Squadron Leader Peter Carter, a 27-year-old budding poet who knows he's going to die. As he pilots his flaming wreck of a plane back across the Chanel, with all of his crew dead or bailed out, he speaks to an American girl on the radio. In these few minutes of insistent chatter -- in which Peter does almost all of the talking, I might add -- we're to believe they formed a lifelong bond that cannot be broken.

The official story is that Peter's angel, otherwise known as Conductor 71 -- a foppish French Revolution-era aristocrat played by Marius Goring -- lost him in the fog and failed to transport him to heaven. As a result, Peter ends up alive on the beach, where he comes across a girl riding a bicycle and lo! It's June (Kim Hunter), the gal he fell in love with over the phone.

Conductor 71 appears 20 hours after the oversight to collect his charge, but Peter objects on the grounds that he fell in love as a result of a heavenly mistake. The conductor agrees to file his appeal up the chain of command.

The military medical staff thinks Peter's gone bonkers, of course, led by an unctuous doctor named Frank Reeves, played by Roger Livesey. Frank humors Peter's story, determining he needs a brain operation or he'll die. On the way to the hospital, Frank is killed in a motorcycle accident during a violent storm, which conveniently allows him to be appointed Peter's counsel for the trial.

The metaphysics of the story are beyond silly. An angel can't find his soul because of fog? Pretty shoddy work for divine beings. I also found silly the trick of Conductor 71 stopping time whenever he's on earth, allowing him to do things like plucking a tear from June's cheek to use at the trial.

What I really couldn't stand, though, was the mawkish idea that two people can fall irrevocably in love in a matter of hours. And that this would be the entire basis upon which Peter's case stands. He can't leave Earth because he loves a woman? What about the millions of women (and men) who lost their true love during the war? Don't they get an appeal?

The actual trial is a just plain weird affair. The prosecution is taken up by a Boston patriot who died during the American Revolution, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey). His arguments are based entirely around his hatred of the English, referring to the many nations around the globe who have suffered in wars of the British empire. His pride veers beyond American exceptionalism into outright bigotry and Anglophobia.

"A Matter of Life and Death" still stands for its excellent cinematography and special effects. The Archers used Technicolor for the earthbound scenes, while the heavenly sequences are in a twinkling black-and-white -- essentially a reverse of the technique used in "The Wizard of Oz." The film was titled "Stairway to Heaven" for its American release, a reference to the stunning image of Peter and his conductor riding a massive escalator up into the sky.

Although it's undeniably a great-looking film, I just found "A Matter of Life and Death" to be too harebrained to take seriously as a piece of important cinema. I was astonished to learn via the film's Wikipedia page that it was named the second most important British film ever in a 2004 magazine survey of critics.

All I can say is they must have also suffered a conk on the head, resulting in overly ambitious delusions.

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "The Dawn Patrol"

I had never seen an Erroll Flynn movie before.

I know, I know. It seems astonishing even to me that a film fanatic of my degree had never encountered a picture by perhaps the biggest cinema star of the first half of the 20th century. Known mostly for action films, he also did plenty of romance and drama. During the 1930s and '40s, he was basically Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks rolled into one.

And to boot, I'm an amateur buff on World War I aviation. So it makes sense perhaps that my first Flynn flick was not "Captain Blood" or "The Adventures of Robin Hood" but "The Dawn Patrol," the 1938 movie where he and David Niven play hard-drinking British pilots who carouse and sing by night, and watch their squadron decimated by day.

On a side note, this film was a remake of another movie just eight years earlier, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the David Niven role. Back then, Hollywood honchos thought nothing of re-using scripts with different stars.

Anyway, "Dawn Patrol" is a solid flick, but two things especially struck me about it.

First, for a dogfighting movie, there's relatively little action in the sky. The big battle is your first real taste of airborne action, and it arrives about halfway through the movie. Then there's another bit of action near the end as Fairbanks sacrifices himself by going on the suicide mission assigned to Niven. But other than that, most of the movie takes place in the squadron bar, as the pilots get stupefied while waiting for fresh green recruits to replace the comrades they've lost each day. I can just imagine some kid in 1938 getting juiced up by the posters calling this the best air combat movie ever, and then feeling ripped off because there's only two scenes of actual fighting.

UPDATE: Bob Bloom, my colleague at the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, informs me that the flying scenes were actually all recycled from the earlier film. Now that's a way to cut down production costs!

(By the way, I believe they're flying Sopwith Camels in the movie, which are highly romanticized planes of the era but were actually rather underpowered machines, though quite maneuverable. The S.E.5 was a much superior craft.)

The other thing the movie impressed on me was its bleak view of war. One expects movies of that era to be full of derring-do and heroic yet unthinking characters. But a great deal of the movie has to do with the officers cursing their generals, and despising the futility of war even as they carry out their duties with carefree bon vivant attitudes. In several of the war movies of the 1930s-50s that I've encountered lately, so many of them contain a much more nuanced and pessimistic approach to war than I had expected.

The plot has a nice simple set-up: Flynn plays Captain Courtney, the top pilot, and Niven is Scottie, the lush who barely sobers up for his morning combat missions. They despise their squadron commander, played by Basil Rathbone, for accepting the overly dangerous assignments given to them by their superiors without complaint (so they think) and not giving any of the green recruits a chance to learn a few basic maneuvers before sending them up into the skies for slaughter. There's a haunting aspect to the recurring scenes of young pilots pulling up to the base in a car, singing with all their might, not realizing they're replacing men who just arrived full of song and brashness a few days earlier, and were blown out of the sky.

Anyway, Scott and Courtney, sickened by the taunts of the local German ace, take off on a drunken unauthorized revenge flight in which they destroy the enemy base. Thinking their commander ordered the daring mission, the generals promote Rathbone, and Courtney becomes the squadron commander, sitting and fretting as he waits back at base, counting the diminishing number of planes that return from each mission. He and Scott become estranged when Scott's younger brother shows up as the greenest of recruits, and soon perishes.

Flynn is suitably dashing in the film, though there's a certain impenetrability to his countenance that I found puzzling. Nowadays we would consider this under-acting, but I think in Flynn's day audiences preferred their heroes a little more reserved.

Looks like I'll have to seek out some more Errol Flynn movies to compare.