Tagged with the optimistic sentiment, "It's a wonderful world, if you'll only take the time to go around it!" Around the World in 80 Days appeared in 1956 and pleased American moviegoers to the tune of $23 million in rentals. Though this was a success on the cost basis of its $6 million budget, the film remains a signpost to former times. As such it has a dated quality that misses a larger resonance and appeal beyond its rather narrow scope to become one of those rarefied cinema classics.

Of course this isn't the only goal of important or self-important films, as the case may be. Often the glories of successfully crafting popular entertainment, returning profits on investments, urging technological advancement or striking new ground with screen subjects are considered the ideals for which individuals movies strive. Still, it is my impression that any Oscar winner should be on par with few other works of its year or any other time across the lines of history and herein is the rub.

Around the World in 80 Days is the kind of movie standing aside from its award-winning record as totally mediocre work in virtually every respect, but especially in retrospect. Its three-hour length, a jumble of all-star cameo performances and global setting make it a treat of family-oriented adventures and travel sequences.

Would that this structure and spectacle were to add up to a more convincing movie and there might have been something more than an assemblage of interesting parts for the purposes of nothing important. That it won the Golden Globe for best drama and the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture only means then-contemporary audiences were deluded into their celebration of tripe. But it also points to the occasionally wayward methods of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with its annually limited taste as it foists top honors and accolades onto various productions, this epic-scale fantasy as no exception.

Ostensibly an adaptation of Jules Verne's novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, screenwriters James Poe, John Farrow and S.J. Perelman chose the low road in giving life to the tale of Phileas Fogg (David Niven). It seems their British eccentric, who is also an aristocrat and monomaniac, has the imperturbable notion of traversing the world in a mere 80 days that runs counter to the conventional wisdom of 1872. Much to the delight of his cohorts who dawdle away drinking and gambling, Fogg bets his fortune vows to succeed at this glorious misadventure.

Recruiting his Spanish manservant Passepartout (Cantinflas) and embarking on his journey with a bag of cash, Fogg is also subject to bad timing. Not only is his adventure beset by all manner of inclement circumstance, it is coincident with the so-called Great Train Robbery of 1872 for which Fogg becomes a prime suspect due to his wealth and willingness to flee England. Naturally Fogg is beyond reproach yet a robbery investigator sets upon him regardless.

And so it goes. Fogg and Passepartout begin circling the globe and are shadowed by the investigator at every turn. Along the way they balloon to Spain, boat through the Mediterranean, ride elephants across India, take a boat over the Pacific Ocean, ride a train across America and return to England by steamboat. They lose time despite their best laid plans, encounter all manner of interesting flora and fauna the world over, bump into assorted pleasant and unpleasant situations and make the acquaintance of the Indian Princess Aouda (Shirley MacLaine) who becomes Fogg's fiancé. Not incidentally they also meet a variety of character types played in cameo by some of Hollywood's, and the West End's, most notable stars of the moment including Noel Coward, Sir John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Harcourt Williams, Fernandel, Charles Boyer, Gilbert Roland, Cesar Romero, Alan Mowbray, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Reginald Denny, Peter Lorre, George Raft, Red Skelton, Marlene Dietrich, John Carradine, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton and even Edward R. Murrow who provides a prologue narration.

Despite all this heavyweight appeal Around the World in 80 Days is very much a travelogue rather than a fiction film. Its use of Todd-A-O cameras and film stock lent well to the spectacular quality of seeking out sights, sounds, people and things in far-off places. To the daily experience of most Americans in 1956 the film's record of Spain, India, China, Japan, San Francisco, New York and England, among other places, was surely one of its primary points of favor despite its somewhat numbing thrills replete with bright colors and splashes of lowest common denominator physical humor.

Unfortunately for me, and very likely every other modern viewer, producer Michael Todd's pet project running under the direction of Michael Anderson is little more than a footnote to the unraveling of widescreen technologies in the 1950s. Though this period of cinematic differentiation from competing leisure pursuits like television led to the increase of ever-wider aspect ratios, larger-than-life color schemes, the golden age of the on-screen musical and more mobile cameras to shoot out of doors, Around the World in 80 Days is just not a very good movie.

Its comic moments seem almost offensive and the places depicted in its length, though clearly a find for the tastes of 1956, are no longer particularly original. Not with our contemporary bombardment with internationally focused news stories, increased travel opportunities for lay and business people alike and certainly not with the continued advancement of widescreen equipment well into the present.

This point concerning historical curiosity out of synch with later, of which Anderson's movie no doubt typifies, is all the more compelling when remembering two isolated moments from Fogg's adventure. The first is a kind of present-tense prologue with Edward R. Murrow, his ever-present cigarette smoldering in hand, who addresses his unseen audience in a way so familiar to TV news watchers in the 1950s. The second is a dance set in Spain as performed by José Greco, a flamenco artist, which remains breathtaking for its athletic achievement.

While Murrow's moments on-screen depict one of American journalisms most important practitioners, Greco's sequence equally points to the timeless quality of the cinema as an art form. On the one hand there is the recording of moments in time so that Murrow's introduction to the translation of Verne's work into film is an apt history lesson and hook for the succeeding film.

On the other hand is the recording of individual performance as framed, augmented and delivered through the medium of film in such a way as to excite the heart and inflame emotional satisfaction. Both tendencies are explicit in movies and both are present in Anderson's film. Unfortunately for Around the World in 80 Days these revelatory moments are few and far in between. Instead what one is faced with in this three-hour, largely unexciting binge of good feeling and little substance is exactly the worst of what's possible in a prestige production. There's an all-star cast, virtually hundreds of extras, a number of startlingly unknown settings, an historical backdrop, literary pedigree and an outright revolution in the recording and exhibiting equipment care of Mr. Michael Todd. But all this does not a great movie make and that's the lasting shame.

All the more so when considering two other movies from 1956 that failed to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture though they have since been raised into the pantheon of great American movies. With the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers Don Siegel delivered a trenchant critique of anti-Red hysteria while also typifying the concerns of science fiction cinema with its treatment of otherworldly beings in dispute with Terrans on mother Earth. Then John Ford offered scorching masterwork about Western expansion, miscegenation, psychosis and the archetypal American hero in The Searchers that showcases one of John Wayne's greatest performances.

Beyond these also rans Around the World in 80 Days is also a suspicious choice for picture of the year honors when considering its competition. While Friendly Persuasion is arguably the least famous of the five nominated titles, Giant is remarkable, among various reasons, for being one of James Dean's three feature film performances if not a sweeping movie in its own right. Of course there's also Yul Brynner's career defining performance opposite Deborah Kerr in The King and I and last, not but definitely not least, there was the Charlton Heston-led Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epic The Ten Commandments that has become a staple of Easter-time TV.

Altogether it's obvious that Around the World in 80 Days wasn't the best picture of its year. Not in light of its nominated competition and certainly not when remembering other work from the times.

What solace I take from this record is that audiences and the Academy itself was quite smitten with former Mr. Elizabeth Taylor Michael Todd and his Todd-A-O spectacle. It couldn't have been for the drama or comedy and so the film remains a benign family adventure without the saving grace of any real lasting worth or substance with which to sustain future revelations or fuel interesting criticism.