Around and Around

Around the World in 80 Days may be my favorite movie.  And I loved the novel.  So, it’s all near and dear to my heart.  The casting of David Niven as Phileas Fogg is near the top of the most perfect casting in Hollywood history.
 
Everything I’ve read about the new limited series from the BBC on PBS that begins tonight makes me cringe.  But I like David Tennant (even if his style has nothing to do with how Phileas Fogg is written) and the production looks rich (even if it has little to do with Jules Verne’s story), so I've thought I'd likely watch – and hope that it keeps enough of the Verne tale and its sensibility to make me want to watch all the way through.

Then the reviews started coming out.  I usually don’t read reviews, but I saw the title of the one by Yahoo’s critic, and it was “More cringeworthy than fun,” so I figured I’d skim it.
 
It sounds horrible.  Not for the reviewer’s opinion – which I might agree with or not, but is just personal opinion – but for the details on how they changed the story.  And…it does sound cringeworthy. 

Just one example.  There is a female character in the new "version" nicknamed “Fix,” which is clearly taken from the name of Inspector Fix, the Scotland Yard detective who tracks Phileas Fogg around the world, mistakenly believing he robbed the Bank of England.  But this new "Fix" character is not a detective but the daughter of a newspaper magnate who joins the journey to document it -- which is almost exactly the Natalie Wood role in The Great Race.  So, perhaps there is no Inspector Fix in this, and (it seems -- since for this "version" the female reporter would appear to be the potential romantic interest -- that likely means perhaps no Princess Aouda joining them halfway around the world in India. 

Now, that might seem no big deal, except that the Princess is basically the reason for the novel!  The very end of Jules Verne's novel notes that Phileas Fogg spent as much money as he won, so he got absolutely nothing out of that.  He writes that the only thing Fogg got from his journey was finding the love of his life -- which leads to the last line of the book, “And after all, dear readers, isn’t that worth traveling around the world for?”  So, they’re cutting out that??!  To be clear, if they make this reporter his love interest, that’s not one and the same.  It's totally different because he doesn’t travel the world to find her, since she starts the trip with him in London and therefore is with him from Day One.

And there's a lot more from the few other comments I skimmed.  Further, there are main character names in the new "version" I've never heard of.

To be clear, I don't hold it against them remaking an Oscar Best Picture.  They've actually been many remakes of the story -- some straightforward (like a TV mini-series in 1989 with Pierce Brosnan, that was fairly well-done, but quite bit flat), and most clearly going in their own direction.  And that's fine when you're not making an pretense of really telling Verne's story.  But this seems to be suggesting it is actually doing Around the World in 80 Days, when it's not.

And I don't expect others to love the movie and novel as much as I do.  Indeed, for people who never saw the original in the theater during its initial release or a 15th anniversary re-release (that I rushed to see), it's very hard to capture the utter joy of the movie, wonderful as it is whatever the screen.  But there are two “problems” with Around the World in 80 Days being a person's favorite movie –

The first is that, as much as I enjoy seeing it in any venue, including a revival art house theater or letter-boxed on Turner Classic Movies, it was specifically made for a massive 70mm widescreen --  indeed, producer Michael Todd developed a widescreen technology called Todd-AO, which was sort of a massive widescreen competitor of Cinemascope, and that’s when Around the World in 80 Days is at its best.  (One of my father’s favorite scenes in all of movies -- and it's high among mine -- is the famous sequence with Fogg's balloon bouncing across the huge screen from left to right as it travels over the Paris sky and then the French Alps, as that glorious theme music plays.  It’s wonderful whenever I see it, but it doesn’t have the glorious majesty and impact of being on a screen so big that it overwhelms  you.)  Now, imagine a little kid staring up in total awe at this stunning vision overwhelming him.

And the other “problem” is trying to introduce an audience to the movie who doesn’t know all those spectacular cameo appearances laced throughout the movie.  (In fact, Michael Todd coined the term "cameo" that we now all know.)  To most audiences today, these more than 50 remarkable cameos of some of movies' all-time greats are just unrecognizable “day players” taking a small character role -- and not “Oh, my God!! That’s Noel Coward, Charles Boyer, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, Sir John Mills, Buster Keaton, Beatrice Lilly, Robert Morley, Sir John Gielgud, Hermione Gingold, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, Gilbert Roland, Trevor Howard...and..." on and on.  Virtually every few minutes, someone new, someone amazing shows up."  That's one of the stunning accomplishments of the original, but with the realities of life, it's pretty much lost to most modern audiences.  Such is life. 

So, alas, it's very difficult for audiences today to get the same appreciation for the movie as it offered for technical and societal reasons.  Even if it again gets released in a theater than can show the Todd-AO widescreen (as it did for its 15th anniversary), those amazing cameos will mean little to most people.  But all that takes nothing from what the movie was.  And also explains why I understand adaptations that put their own twists on it.

But I have no plans to watch – I have far too much great affection for the movie and novel to care much for something that's not putting its own twists on, but rather appears to be totally rewriting the story in ways that seem problematic while purporting to be Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days.  That said, I do want to see how it starts and sets Phileas Fogg and Passepartout off on their journey.  I suspect it may be a fun production for many who don't know the novel or original Oscar-winning Best Picture -- and may be cringeworthy for some of them, as well.  I may also possibly tune in to a later episode just to see what they’re doing, but that’s it.  Bizarrely, the article says it’s already been renewed for a second season.  Second season??  That means they either don’t resolve it in season 1, or they’ve come up with another story line.

I'll leave things with these three videos.  The first is the trailer of the original movie --
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​And here it is, winning the 1957 Best Picture Oscar.  (Though the video runs four minutes, Michael Todd's acceptance ends around two minutes in) --

And we'll go out with the joyous main theme, performed as the "Sky Symphony" (during the balloon sequence) from Victor Young's Oscar-winning score --