First, let me say I thought this movie was visually and aurally stunning—what gorgeous cinematography and a lovely score! Second, though, what a bizarre year for the Academy Awards. Don’t get me wrong. I think Around the World in 80 Days (1956) (Michael Todd Company/United Artists) is a completely deserving Best Picture winner. However, its competition was stiff, and it is more than a little surprising that we’re not discussing the popular The King and I or Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments this week, both of which received nominations for Oscar’s highest prize for 1956. The King and I was most likely the expected winner that year with nine nominations (it won five), while The Ten Commandments astoundingly won merely one of the seven categories for which it was nominated (not a huge shock that it took home the Oscar for Special Effects—Moses’s parting of the Red Sea still blows my mind). Around the World in 80 Days fell in the middle of these two great films with eight nominations, including Art Direction (Color), Costume Design (Color), and Directing for Michael Anderson. The film won five Academy Awards: Film Editing, Writing (Screenplay-Adapted), Cinematography (Color), Music (Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture), and Best Motion Picture. It is only the sixth BP that we’ve discussed to receive no acting nominations (anyone remember the other five?).

Speaking of astounding statistics, Around the World in 80 Days employed a cast of nearly 70,000 (including extras), along with almost 8,000 animals (including “a sacred cow that eats flowers on cue,” according to Time magazine). Some of the members of the cast were Hollywood icons who show up in the film for cameo roles of only a couple of seconds’ or minutes’ duration. Frank Sinatra appears as the saloon piano player. Red Skelton is a drunk. Marlene Dietrich is the saloon hostess. Noël Coward (the writer of the play upon which 1933’s Cavalcade is based) is the manager of an employment agency. And so on. Supposedly, though, John Wayne turned down an offer to make a cameo appearance in the film. Too bad for us (and for him as well, as the Duke was never part of a BP winner).

Frank Sinatra in his cameo appearance as the saloon piano man.

Filmed in 75 days in over 100 locations in 13 countries, Around the World in 80 Days cost about $6 million to make. Michael Todd, the film’s producer, had never produced a film before. To help finance his new venture, he sold his interest in Todd-AO, a post-production company he had co-founded with the American Optical Company. Todd-AO helped to revolutionize the way that movies were filmed, as well as how they were presented in theaters. The cost of making Around the World in 80 Days plummeted Todd into debt, and his creditors actually constantly supervised the post-production of the film, treating the film materials as if they were in escrow. To Todd’s great relief, Around the World in 80 Days was a huge box office hit; and his fortunes were restored. Less than half a year after the film’s release, Todd married the much younger Elizabeth Taylor. It was the third marriage for both parties. Tragically, their wedded bliss (or stormy relationship, to be more accurate) was short-lived. Todd was killed when his private plane crashed near Grants, New Mexico, on March 22, 1958. Taylor had wanted to accompany her husband on his trip to New York to receive an award for “Showman of the Year,” but he had made her stay home in Hollywood as she was suffering from a cold. (You can check out one newspaper’s announcement of the tragedy at this website: http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/574514).

Passepartout and Fogg consult on how to fly their new hot air balloon.

The film version of Around the World in 80 Days had big shoes to fill as Jules Verne’s novel of the same title had been extremely popular since its publication in 1872. Incidentally, the novel does not contain the famous scene in which Fogg and Passepartout travel in a hot air balloon. But it does feature an interesting conversation relating to travel and a quickly changing world. When one of his whist friends states that the “world is big enough,” Fogg controversially counters by replying, “It was once.” In Verne’s day, as in the 1950s, advances in technology were shrinking the world that people used to know—or, rather, technology was making it possible for people to better know the world in which they lived. For the novel’s nineteenth-century audience, trains and steamers were enabling people to reach locales they had only read about in shorter amounts of time than they had ever dreamed of. In the 1950s, in the aftermath of the World Wars, many young people had been abroad or had been familiarized with foreign locations through television and movies. Additionally, the rise of the commercial jetliner as well as the construction of the superhighways and the improvement in automobile capability led to more Americans on the move (as well as the advent of the fast food industry for all those travelers!). Verne, himself a lover of travel and adventure, hit the nail on the head with his novel. Around the World in 80 Days might be the story of a man attempting to win a bet, but it also relates a blossoming of the knowledge of humanity from different parts of this beautiful world we live in—we’re all quite different, but in a lot of ways we’re all the same.

For more thoughts on Around the World in 80 Days and its significance, please check out the full post this weekend!