In 1872, the house at Number Seven, Saville Row was occupied by Phileas Fogg, Esquire, one of the most remarkable and unusual members of the London Reform Club...
...`...Now you seem convinced that a trip around the world takes only three months...’
`Only eighty days!’ corrected Phileas Fogg.
...`All right, Mr. Fogg,’ he cried, `four thousand pounds. It’s a bet!’
...`The train for Dover leaves at eight forty-five. I shall take it.’
...Detective Fix was also at the station. He had noticed that Mr. Fogg intended to leave Bombay...
...`It is sixteen hundred and fifty miles from Hong Kong to Yokohama. The journey is much too far.’
`Only sixteen hundred,’ said Mr. Fogg
...During the entire journey there was not a single incident. On November 23rd the General Grant crossed the hundred and eightieth meridian.
...A train, once in motion, is hard to stop—even in America.
...Phileas Fogg had taken himself to the SS Henrietta in a small boat.
...Thus Phileas Fogg had completed his journey around the world, but he was five minutes late. The bet was lost.
...`Because tomorrow is Sunday.’
`Tomorrow is Monday,’ Mr. Fogg said calmly.
`No. Tomorrow is Sunday because today is Saturday!’
`Saturday? Impossible!’
Mike Todd began as a Broadway producer in the 1930s and set up his film company in 1945, with a series of pretty average films until he undertook Jules Verne’s fabulous yarn of a man who tries to go Around the World in Eighty Days to win a bet with the stuffy old duffers at the Reform Club. From a first draft adaption by Orson Welles, and utilising a new wide-screen film process he humbly called Todd-AO—a fore-runner of the modern 70mm process—Todd set out to give Verne’s fabulous tale the full treatment.
The movie was released in 1956, and it is a showman’s film. Welles was superseded by three writers, including SJ Perelman and the resultant cinema experience was armed with a stack of lead actors in cameo and minor roles. It is more a pageant than a movie, lingering lovingly over all matters of dance and ritual. David Niven is perfectly cast as Phileas Fogg, although the Spanish clown and bullfighter Cantinflaus was a rather poor choice for Passepartout. Robert Newton as the dogged but dim-witted Detective Fix, tags along, believing Fogg to be a fugitive bank robber while Shirley MacLane plays the rescued princess who in no time melts the clockwork heart of Phileas Fogg.
Often boring, and far too long, the film is nevertheless an extraordinary monument to a prodigious talent, and its good bits and 44 stars bobbing up everywhere keep it alive. It has some outstanding sequences, but is only ever really on the rails at the beginning and the end, and in those few other bits when it sticks to Verne’s original marvellous concept. Whatever the merits of the movie, it is still a terrific ride, and the marvellous ending makes up for everything. They complete the journey with a day to spare, and it is at this moment that Detective Fix arrests Fogg, preventing him from catching the train to London. Fogg spends the night in the Dover lock-up and the time for the bet expires while he is there. And then, when it is all too late, Fix comes and tells Fogg that the real bank robber has been captured and he is free to go. But the time has been lost and they return to London in defeat.
The next day begins with Fogg philosophical about his failure and the princess trying to console him. And then, a miracle…You need to come from another planet (literally) to not know the answer to Fogg’s problem and how it all works out, but just in case you do, I won’t spoil it.
Mike Todd was the only husband Elizabeth Taylor lost through no fault of her own when he was tragically killed in a plane crash in 1958 at the age of 51.
Phileas Fogg was a man truly obsessed by time and as he rushed me Around the World in 80 Days, I was delighted to see that he too got all muddled up in time. It was something I did every day.
But that was understandable—how was I to know that time itself was equally muddled up with space and distance?
