We are really in the era of upbeat stories now. This is my favorite Jules Verne book so I was actually looking forward to seeing the movie version. For the most part I was not disappointed. Starring David Niven as Phileas Fogg, Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout, Robert Newton as Detective Fix, and Shirley MacLaine as Aouda, (and most of the rest of Hollywood cameoing in one way or another) it's the story of a very proper English gentleman who in 1872 makes a wager to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days or forfeit his fortune. Hijinks ensue.
Niven makes a really good Fogg; his only flaw was his total lack of chemistry with MacLaine, even at the end when they've decided to marry. Interestingly, in some countries Cantinflas was given top billing over Niven, and he really does steal every scene that he's in. There's an entire very lengthy sequence in Spain that is not in the book added just to showcase him, which includes a hot air balloon flight, flamenco dance, and a bullfight. Even though the movie is already really long (this is the same year The Ten Commandments came out, so it was the era for ginormous epics), I can't complain too much because the whole thing was very entertaining.
There are of course the inevitable uncomfortable stereotypes about non-Western people, though to be fair I think the filmmakers were embracing negative stereotypes-played-for-laughs about literally all the places Fogg visits (Including England with the exaggerated stiff-upper-lip-ness of the Reform Club members and white America with the idiotic guy in California blithely trying to get two foreign nationals to vote in the local election for mayor and the gun duel over nothing Fogg fights with a cowboy in the back of a moving train). Probably the grossest insults are having a blue-eyed white woman play Aouda, who in the book is half-English and half-Indian but in the movie is supposed to be an Indian woman only educated in England, and the feather headdress-wearing, burning-people-at-the stake Native Americans straight out of a 50s Cowboys and Indians serial. But overall it was a fun romp in the vein of other classic road trip movies I've enjoyed like The Great Race.
Watched: January 13, 2019
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