Around the World in 80 Days 1956

Around the World in 80 Days is one of the movies that is considered one of the least deserving movies to win best picture. It is not a bad movie and not really the worst movie to to ever win best picture but definitely not a great movie. Arguments could be made for other movies that year that should have won.

The movie is an adaption of the great Jules Verne novel. I read the novel when I was in 5th grade and loved it. Needless to say I don't remember much from the book now but remember it was a fun action story.  It is about Phileas Fogg played by David Niven who makes a wager that he can go around the world in 80 days. Along with his man servant Passepartout they take off and travel by balloon, train, ship, elephant and whatever else they find to make the deadline. Along the way the encounter numerous obstacles including a detective that thinks Fogg is a bank thief and a rescue of a princess in India.
The movie sounds like great fun and the book was, but the problem the movie has is it's 3 hour run time. There are sequences in the movie that just seem to drag on. One sequence in particular is the bull fighting sequence. In which Passepartout has to fight a bull in order for them to use a yacht. The sequence goes on and on and gets really boring after a while. Also kind of annoying was the first 10 minutes of the movie which is some guy explaining the importance of the Jules Verne novel and giving a short history lesson on Verne. Entirely unnecessary. When you have a 3 hour movie it is best not to add extra stuff that is not needed. Not sure why they felt the need to explain that at the time Verne wrote the novel that it was unimaginable to go around the world that fast. Another part that just felt ridiculous was the Indian attack when they were traveling on the transcontinental railroad in the United States. People are getting hit with arrows but when Passepartout goes out on the train all the arrows just bounce right off of him. The scene is laughable and takes away from whatever cool action scene it could have been.

The movie wasn't all bad. A few things it had going for it was it use of scenery from exotic locations. When they are traveling you see long scenes of the location(possible lingering too long at some spots). While most of the movie was shot in sound stages it was nice to see some footage of the actual locations. Also, it had at least a dozen cameos from famous actors. Including Buster Keaton, Frank Sinatra, Cesar Romero and Peter Lorre. In fact it was this movie that made popular the term cameo. Other interesting facts about the movie is it had one of the largest number of extras of any movie and also the largest number of animals of any movie at that time. It also had the largest number of costumes used of any movie. That all made the movie one of the biggest movie productions of all time.

Having one of the largest productions off all time is probably why the movie won best picture.  It highlights one of the Academy's biggest issues do you reward movies that are ambitious and big or movies that may be smaller but better quality. This if a problem that they still have today, do you give it to movies like Titanic or Avatar(which surprisingly lost) which are large and make alot of money or smaller budget movies that are better and tell a great story. In my opinion this also the same reason that The Greatest Show on Earth won. When you look at the 50's and the advent of television the film industry thought they were going to lose alot of money. So to compete with television they highlighted these huge dramatic big budget movies. With the exception of Marty which was based on a television show alot of the movies in the 50's was trying to showcase bigger and better. So, a movie shot in widescreen in color  with exotic locations had what people couldn't see on television. 1956 was the first year that all the Best Picture nominees were in color. The 50's were a very interesting time for movies.

Other movies that were nominated for best picture that year were The Ten Commandments, The King and I, and Giant. Also released that year was the John Ford's  The Searchers considered one of the best Westerns but did not get any nominations. 1956 was also the year that the first competitive Foreign Language category. Up till then they had just been a special award given to the Best Foreign Language movie but this year there were 5 nominees and  La Strada became the first winner. Also that year James Dean got nominated for his second posthumous nominations for Giant(he was nominated the previous year for East of Eden).