Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)

Second viewing (first viewing was on April 24, 1994).

Based on the novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours by Jules Verne, first published in 1872, in serial form in a newspaper.

An Englishman named Phileas Fogg makes a wager with his fellow club members that he will make a trip around the Earth in eighty days at the most. His newly hired servant Passepartout is taken along with him. Several unforeseen incidents appear along the way to delay them. To complicate things further, a Scotland Yard agent follows Fogg on the suspicion that he is the man who robbed the Bank of England.

It doesn't quite do justice to the novel in terms of excitement and pace, which are sacrificed for set-pieces like a bullfighting sequence, a Spanish dance sequence, and a balloon voyage which is not in the novel. Still, the set-pieces are somewhat enjoyable for their own sake, and the film as a whole has a reasonable amount of entertainment value. The English club sequence in the beginning is a very funny satire of the English character. Although almost a century separates the novel from the film, the societal values expressed by both are pretty much the same, implicitly praising European values and criticizing a backward society like India through a depiction of its fanatical practice of the suttee (in which a widow is sacrificed when her husband dies). Native-Americans are portrayed as mere savages (remember this is based on a French author who probably was neither aware of nor interested in the subtleties of Native-American history). All this would be inadmissible in our "politically correct" days and, in fact, the 2004 remake has nothing of the sort, and none of the values expressed by the novel.

Watched it in a pan-and-scan copy of about 150 minutes (the uncut version is about 180 minutes).

Rating: 51 (up from 47)