THE COSMOPOLITAN Fl L M Fro m: Around the.. drfd in Eighty Days to Wa Mn g:: M o v i es: A ro u n c tM^Wbric in its 1946 annual report, the Motion Picture Association of America proclaimed the global appeal of film, articulating what Hollywood hoped to achieve at the time: to reach all the world's spectators. "Because the moving, talking images on the screen have all the immediacy and vitality of life itself, film spectators all over the world come into each other's presence and live together in the same reality. The community of film spectators is a symbol of the world community yet to come."1 That same year, in the wake of war, Hollywood resumed a steady distribution of its films abroad. But beyond that, the MPAA boldly claimed that film would create rather than simply reflect the world community yet to come. As we have already seen, nations and nationness played a complicated role in film culture during the postwar period and were constructed and deployed in often unpredictable ways: Frenchness could mean something particular to filmmakers; a film festival in Cannes could both help to launch a French superstar and internationalize film culture by decentering Hollywood without excluding it. The French-American film connection after the war also helped foster and create a context for the "cosmopolitan" film culture of the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, European and American filmmakers turned their attention to "the world" as a place for production, as an unlimited market and as a concept to be thematized in their films. If Hollywood had once served as a magnetic geographic center for filmmakers, the postwar era witnessed a decentering of production, explained at the time by both the press and people within the industry as film's "internationalization." This chapter examines this internationalist rhetoric in relation to the changing nature of film production itself and in the emergence of the "hybrid" films made as a result of this practice that themselves self-consciously thematized the idea of a unified, transnational "world." Thus cosmopolitanism in cinema was not simply Americanization through film. It was instead a key moment in the construction of film as a global cultural practice. The cosmopolitan film represents both a mode of production and a film's self- conscious relation to its own status as somehow reaching beyond nations and national identity in search of a global consciousness and cosmopolitanism, especially in their attempts to get beyond the nation as essential limit to identification. The film cycle consisted of a hodgepodge of films—some of which were commercially successful, others of which were positively received in critical terms or have survived to become integrated into an "auteur"' canon as with the films of director David Lean. Cosmopolitan films do not constitute a genre since they do not systematically share conventions that would allow them to be meaningfully classified that way. 160 CHAPTER FOUR The CosmopolitanFilm 161 But they also cannot be sufficiently explained by describing the structure of their financing. One could possibly describe them as coproductions but that term is neither a sufficient explanation of the economic globalization of cin -ema, nor can the economic organization of film stand as the "proof" of its ; internationalization. Identifying the economic practice of coproduction is only to begin to describe one aspect of the cosmopolitan cinema. Cosmopolitan film refers to the overlap of a certain mode of production (independent, location-shooting and/or shooting outside Hollywood, an "international" cast) with the thematic preoccupation of the globe or in-ternationalism. They were hybrid films that reflected an attempt to "think 5 and feel beyond the nation." Many of the epics made during the period, for : example, fit into the category but not all the cosmopolitan films are epics (for example, the James Bond pictures, Jules Dassin's Never on Sunday, or the comic-thriller Charade). By naming the cosmopolitan films, recognizing their hybridity in national and generic terms and historicizing them within changes in film production and as part of the broader postwar culture of "internationalism," fostered as we have seen, by an interesting partnership between Paris and Hollywood, we identify an important moment in the history of film as a global practice. The cosmopolitan film cycle emerged as part of the broader transatlantic developments in film already described in this study. When contextualized in relation to the flourish of popular Frenchness films, to the career of Bri-gitte Bardot and to the rising box office of foreign film in the United States, we can see how and why the route between Hollywood and France helped to forge a global film culture. But this chapter also argues that the film cycle has a very precise history in which the success of Mike Todd's 1956 adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days played a critical role in the cycle's development. Todd's only feature film defined the qualities of the cosmopolitan film cycle in terms of production, visual codes, and themes, yet it remains singular in its combination of those attributes. Almost entirely omitted from the history of film, except when embarrassed comments are made about the fact that is was awarded the best picture Oscar of 1956, its remarkable commercial and critical success also helped shape the history of the cosmopolitan film as others sought to imitate many of its elemental ingredients to reproduce its box office popularity. Late in the 1960s, as the first wave of cosmopolitan films seemed to subside, economist Thomas Guback studied the internationalization of cinema and contended that it would inevitably lead to the "homogenization" of culture. As he put it, "the finished product will reflect universal idioms at the expense of national ones____What is happening is the extension, on an international scale, of industrial production applied to culture."2 His sense of this phenomenon was categorically negative: "So many of the new international films border on dehumanization by brutalizing sensitivity, often deflecting attention from reality. They count on developing audience response with synthetic machine-made images. Their shallowness and cardboard characters are camouflaged with dazzling colors, wide screens and directorial slickness."3 Guback*s position is characteristic of the retrospective analysis of what many observers at the time called film's "international" trend. In fact, there are few groups of films as denigrated as these, described by French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere as "middle ocean pictures." Carriere called them "those films which sought to be both European and American at the same time and which ultimately were neither, but just good for throwing into the middle of the ocean."4 Earlier, in 1963, a study by Jean-Claude Batz shared the French director's disdain for international production: "The internationalization of the market demands the internationalization of film content, a hybridity in intellectual view, the triumph of places in common, ideas accepted by large numbers of people, the banality of mil-lenarian ideas____in a word, international co-production consecrates a cultural potpourri."5 Another journalist, writing in disgust at the state of the film industry he observed while at Cannes in the late 1960s, wrote that the movies had retreated into an "increasingly international no-man's land."6 Since then, scholars have had trouble making sense of these films. Peter Lev described the Euro-American cinema of the period, which he identified as big-budget English-language films made by European art directors intended to please a sophisticated international audience.7 He also connected the films to the Cannes Film Festival, identifying it as the leading showcase for the international art film. Lev's emphasis on a commercialized art cinema, however, leapfrogs over the more explicitly big-budget and commercial Euro-American cinema under consideration here. Although he mentions that such films as Never on Sunday had an important launch in Cannes, he neglects to mention the big-budget extravaganzas, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Doctor Zhivago, played at Cannes in opening and closing night galas. Rather than be dismissed as a cultural potpourri, these films deserve reconsideration for what they can tell us about how film transcended national idioms and how and why the decade of the mid-1950s to mid-1960s seemed to generate these sorts of films in rapid succession, mostly to great commercial success and sometimes accompanied by contemporary critical acclaim. 162 CHAPTER FOUR The Cosmopolitan Film 163 Film's internationalism had prewar roots in Hollywood. The industry's official rhetoric insisted that the success of Hollywoodproduct abroad arose from its integration of universal themes and issues. The MPAA boasted that Hollywood had long represented the world's stories: "no other picture-making country in the world ranged so far, thematically and geographically, for its story material, backgrounds and locales. Hollywood's perennial practice of drawing on world literature, world history and the world's arena for its inspiration and material provided cogent reasons why U.S. movies continued to enjoy public support in theatres around the globe."8 There can be little doubt that the Hollywood filmmaking community had, indeed, drawn broadly—perhaps not from the entire world but certainly from European literature, art and history. European-born personnel, from directors to actors and editors, had worked assiduously in Hollywood during the expansion of the studios. The experiment with multilingual films in Joinville in the early sound era also produced an intense sense that film would "internationalize" as much as sound hardened national differences.9 Producer Walter Wanger could reasonably refer to Hollywood as a "veritable celluloid Athens" while trying to persuade the government that the film industry had much to offer as a model for American leadership after the war.10 In fact, Wanger boasted of the internationalism of the film industry, which poised it for a great role in diplomacy: "we have never been nationalistic. Ho one has ever been able to say that Hollywood did not want talent because it was English, French, Italian, German or Russian. There has never been any nationalistic thinking on subjects or castings and our pictures are still the most popular in the world. We have more international content in our pictures than is to be found in the films of any other country. "nA decade later, in i960, the Motion Picture Academy explained in a report, "While Hollywood is still the film center of the world, we know that ours is an international business. We are producing for the peoples of the world as well as for the American people. A global industry calls for global activity and global thinking,"12 The increasing sense of the movie business as international did not simply come from imagining a worldwide audience. The Paramount decrees of 1948 weakened the Hollywood studios and inaugurated the first era of "runaway production." New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther observed the phenomenon with great interest and asked his paper to send him to Europe in i960 to report on what he thought was the most important new trend in cinema production: "The whole European area is right now coming along with the greatest challenge to Hollywood as the prime locality of film pro- duction that the old glamour town has ever known— The big thing today and for the future seems to be this internationalization of the production of films."13 Crowther was not alone in his interpretation of the changes in filmmaking. By 1964, the trade press was already explaining the causes of the phenomenon rather than merely describing it: "Reasons for making motion pictures abroad: demand by present day audiences for unqualified realism; need to make motion pictures with universal appeal because of increasing dependence on foreign market; lower production costs abroad for scenes in spectaculars requiring use of thousands of extras; and the need to maintain the strength of world-wide distribution organizations through cooperative arrangements with foreign film interests."14 In short, by the mid-1960s global filmmaking had become recognized as the order of the day. When Paul Lazarus, executive vice president of Bronston Pictures, flew from Spain, where he was involved in the production of 55 Days at Peking, to address the meeting of independent theater owners, he explained what he dubbed the "worldwide concept in picture production." He announced that his boss, Samuel Bronston, believed in "making your pictures where they should be made.... No community, no country holds the exclusive patent on good film-making." Bronston Pictures attempted to provide a regular supply of family features to reestablish the theater as a familial recreational center. They sought to create films "too big, too colorful, too elaborate" for television, and make films "equally acceptable and suitable on the broadest international base, not particularized by any national interest."15 In other words, runaway production for Lazarus offered a positive agenda, and cannot be understood merely as a bric-a-brac response to a variety of difficult circumstances in filmmaking. While taking note of the phenomenon, many observers at the time derided the internationalization of motion pictures because they believed that it was motivated by economic rather than authentic artistic interests. Crowther spoke of the decline of the particular and peculiar film of national idiosyncrasies in favor of the "all-purpose entertainment film."16 Yet he was also open to the notion that the films were not simply an economic expression in cultural form. He noted that the economics of international coproduction may have instigated the phenomenon but that the results were a "curious sort of hybridization of the motion pictures of the Western world."17 This new form of production generated a range of films, some of which were commercially successful, others of which were not. By taking a closer look at the structure of cosmopolitan film production and by exam- 164 CHAPTER FOUR The Cosmopolitan Film 165 ining the films themselves, we can better understand the internationalization of the film industry and what visions of globalism actually looked like in film. This story begins with an American theatrical impresario directing the worldwide production of a French story about a shrinking globe. although many pactors contributed to the development of the cosmopolitan film cycle, one filmmaker and one film constituted an important starting point: Mike Todd's Around the World in Eighty Days. In May 1957, this film sensation inaugurated the tenth annual Cannes Film Festival. The festivities included the appearance of Phileas Fogg's balloon in the skies over the Croisette and the arrival of the film's producer Mike Todd with his new wife Elizabeth Taylor dressed in tiara and ermine, in her grey, mono-grammed Rolls Royce {fig. 4.1). The evening showcased the European premiere of a film that had already been taking the United States by storm for over six months. 4.1 Mike Todd and Elizabeth Tayior, opening night at Cannes, 1957. Courtesy: Corbis. Mike Todd made only one feature film in his lifetime, financed it almost exclusively with personal funds (thereby owning almost 80 percent of the movie), and died while it continued to play on screens around the world. Yet, the story of Mike Todd's Around the World in Eighty Days is an essential element in the history of the cosmopolitan film. Todd and his film stand as an example of the changes in the film industry that facilitated the production of cosmopolitan films. But more important, the scope of the film's economic and critical success also spurred important developments in film production, which helped drive the film cycle. That Todd, a man with virtually no education and even less cultural capital, would turn to a story by the famous French author, Jules Verne, first published in 1873, attests to the long-lasting international fame and popularity of both the author and his tale. According to his son, Mike Todd, Jr., the story was the first book his father ever read. Like many of Verne's stories, Around the World in Eighty Days enjoyed great sales in serial form and then as a novel not only in France but also in England and America. Like other Verne stories, it was adapted for the stage (in 1874) and served as material for early screen adaptations as well.18 Todd's involvement with the Verne story began in 1946 with a proposed theatrical collaboration with Orson Welles, who had already produced a radio version of the tale in 1938 for his Mercury Theatre.19 Todd came to this theatrical production with a reputation as one of the most successful stage producers of the previous five years. The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, he was raised in Minnesota and had an early career in construction, where he developed a reputation as a high-stakes gambler. By 19 46, Todd had achieved his great aspiration: to become an American showman in the tradition of Florenz Ziegfeld. He burst onto the theatrical scene at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934, where he produced the "flame dance," which offered crowds a spectacular version of a burlesque strip in which a woman dressed as a moth attracts a flame and burns her costume off. A few years later, he was known for such hits as The Hot Mikado (starring Bill Robinson), Harvey, Something for the Soys (starring Ethel Merman), and for his Theatre Cafe in Chicago, which featured Gypsy Rose Lee in what Todd imagined as an American Folies Bergeres show for the whole family20 Orson Welles and Mike Todd shared a vision of creating a theatrical "fairytale for adults" by bringing the Verne story to the stage in musical form. The two imagined an over-the-top production that would rely, like many other Todd productions, on spectacular stage effects. They hired Cole Porter, with whom Todd had already worked on three productions, to write the CHAPTER FOUR The Cosmopolitan Film score. Their collaboration began in February 1946 but ended only months later when Todd walked away from his $40,000 investment because he could not abide Welles's inability to actually write a script. As Todd explained on Tex and Jinx Mccreary's radio show: "I have one superstition in show business. I do like to read a script."21 Welles then turned to the director, producer, and head of London Films, Alexander Korda, to provide the financing for the production, in exchange for which Korda was given the rights to the film. The stage production ran eight weeks in late 1946, and ended in financial failure.22 The intervening years brought many changes to Mike Todd's career, while plans for a film project based on Verne's novel were discussed in a variety of filmmaking circles simultaneously. What made those years so interesting for Todd's career were the same things that put Around the World on the agendas of other filmmakers as well: the advent of widescreen, the preference for location shooting, independent production, international casting, and "globalism" as a point of view. In short, Todd's career and his film embodied a central point in the confluence of these different aspects of 1950s and 1960s filmmaking that are key elements of the cosmopolitan film. cinerama was the first of these confluent aspects. Cinerama is the name of the pioneering form among the 1950s innovations in widescreen technology whose novelty and scale would provide unprecedented spectacle at the movie theater. Because widescreen threatened to devalue the holdings in studio film libraries and possibly even make those films obsolete, it should come as no surprise that men from outside the film industry were responsible for the innovation that became known as Cinerama, but its investors also came from outside Hollywood.23 Novelty for its own sake may have been the impetus for the development of film as a medium, as historians of early film have shown, but it became even more attractive as film would have to lure its shrinking audience out of their houses and away from their televisions in order to get them back into the theaters. Fred Waller, the inventor of water skis and the man who had successfully used multicamera technology to help train aerial gunners in World War II, has been credited with inventing Cinerama. The format approximated the depth of human vision and used three cameras and three projectors to fill a huge and deeply curved screen with the Cinerama films. Sound engineer Hazard Reeves joined the project and succeeded in stoking the interest of the well-known radio commentator, lecturer, and journalist Lowell Thomas. Almost thirty years before, Thomas had made the travelogue With Al-lenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia and toured with the film, giving lectures and turning T. E. Lawrence into a celebrity.24 In 1950, Thomas was still up to the same sort of sensational journalism. This time, he had caught the attention of Todd because of an expedition that Thomas and his son made to Tibet on the heels of the Chinese invasion there. The son had planned to do a lecture tour based on the trip, and Mike Todd, casting about for projects, thought he could promote the tour. He proposed to kick it off by holding the first of the film lectures in Madison Square Garden before a crowd of thousands. Having seen the Thomas footage, which he liked, Todd worried that even blowing up the 16mm film to 35mm would not work in a space as vast as Madison Square Garden. He shared this concern with Thomas, who invited him to see a demonstration of a project with which he had recently become involved: projecting films on the largest screen ever built25 Lowell Thomas brought Todd into Cinerama. Todd saw dazzling footage of a rollercoaster ride and was convinced that Cinerama would revolutionize the filmgoing experience. He and Thomas became business partners with an exclusive license to exploit Cinerama. Next they needed to make a movie. Before he hooked up with Todd, Thomas had promised his friend, the celebrated documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, that he could produce and direct the first Cinerama feature. According to Mike Todd, Jr., while Flaherty worked on the concept for a film, Todd kept an opportunistic eye on the news, looking for potential opportunities to film sequences for the Cinerama movie. After observing the missed opportunity to film General MacArthur's return in the ticker tape parade in New York, Todd packed up Flaherty and crew and sent them to Chicago where MacArthur would next be welcomed at Soldier Field. The filming took place in April 1951 in a torrential downpour. Flaherty developed pneumonia and died in July. Todd stepped into the creative breach. Todd turned Flaherty's death into an opportunity to gain experience as a globe-trotting filmmaker. The film would become This Is Cinerama! a travelogue of visions of Europe and America, which introduced the process to the general public. Moving beyond General MacArthur, Todd next thought the film could present cultural festivals around the world. He and the Cinerama crew went on location to Edinburgh, Salzburg, Vienna (where they botched a shoot), Venice, and Milan. Although he was able to assemble an impressive set of location shoots, as he and the crew watched the footage, Todd became increasingly concerned with the flaws of the system; seam lines, fuzzy edges, and what was probably the greatest insight into the limits of ies CHAPTER FOUR The Cosmopolitan Film 169 mere spectacle by a man known for his brilliant exploitation of it: "You can't spend your life on the roller coaster. Someday someone's going to want to say, 'I love you,' and the seams are going to get in the way."26 Cinerama films could be best exploited in episodic travelogues, magnificent landscape, and locomotion, and the effect remains with us today in IMAX films.27 But Todd believed that the films would need to develop their narrative capacities if the format were to have any real impact. In short, he did not believe that travel and spectacle would be enough.28 Todd wanted the board of Cinerama to invest in perfecting the process. The board did not want to be told what to do by Todd, who was in bankruptcy at the time. When Thisk Cinerama! made its debut in September 1952, the Cinerama board of directors had already bought out Todd, seeking to divest themselves of his tarnished financial reputation as the company went public. The film ran 122 weeks and grossed $4.7 million in New York alone.29 Todd seized the opportunity to move forward on improving the process. While the studios battled it out in the aftermath of Cinerama with a variety of widescreen formats such as CinemaScope and Vista Vision, Todd believed that it was possible to get "Cinerama" to come out of one hole, employing both a single lens and a single camera. He went to the leading optics engineer of the time, Dr. Brian O'Brien, to solve the problem.30 The result of Todd's idea and O'Brien's science became known as "Todd-AO" (standing for O'Brien's American Optical company), a process that appeared so promising that the new company was able to persuade the holders of the hottest entertainment property of the era to make their Broadway show into the first Todd-AO film. They signed Rodgers and Hammerstein to make a screen version of their wildly successful musical, Oklahoma! Unfortunately for Todd, the arrangement granted the composers artistic control over the project, and Todd, while holding financial stakes in the process that deepened his own pockets, had to shop around for his own vehicle to produce, which would become the second film made in Todd-AO. Todd bounced around Europe during this period looking for projects to make in Todd-AO. When he had earlier been making the rounds in Europe shooting Cinerama, he met Alexander Korda in London. Todd contacted him again in 1954 and they agreed to coproduce Richard III with Laurence Olivier in Todd-AO. That is, until Todd realized that he would not have artistic control if he worked with Olivier. He then tried to convince John Huston to reshoot Moby Dick in Todd-AO. Huston said no. He next set his sights on making War and Peace and went to Russia to enlist the government to par- ticipate in this unprecedented Cold War thawing project. Todd believed the message would be antiwar, which was sorely needed for an exceptional Russian-American coproduction. When the Russians seemed reluctant, he went to Yugoslavia. General Tito consented to use his army for filming, and it seemed he would move ahead until the Russians started making noises that they had decided to make their own film version of the Russian epic.' In the meantime, Todd returned to London and asked Korda for advice. It was then that Korda offered him Around the World in Eighty Days. He explained that he had invested in the Welles stage production in exchange for the film rights and that Welles had even shot a few scenes in Africa and Italy.31 Not even a year earlier, Variety had reported that Cy Howard and Alexander Korda would produce the film, starring Alec Guinness as Phileas Fogg.32 Reports differ as to whether Todd and Korda agreed that Korda would produce and direct the English shoots or that he would simply have nothing to do with the project. In November 1954, Variety announced that Mike Todd had bought the rights and all treatments and scripts from Korda for $240,ooo.33 But Welles, Korda, and Todd were not the only people interested in the story. Stanley Donen apparently spent the better part of 1948 trying to convince Arthur Freed to do an MGM musical based on the Verne story.34 In the spring of 1953, John Mock wrote an interoffice memo to director William Wyler that explains the film rights to the Verne story.3S The memo explains that the story was in the public domain in the United States, would become available in Europe in two years, and that Korda had had something to do with the rights, although he was not sure that was still the case. He also mentioned the stage version by Welles and said it would, of course, still be under copyright. Classic tales are always kicking about the filmmaking community but the interest in such tales also seems to reemerge in particularly meaningful historical moments. Around the World was an ideal vehicle for this moment in filmmaking, which may help explain why several producers and directors independently pursued it. The success of Todd's film was also a sign of the times. The enormous global profits of Around the World resulted from its status as an exceptional film marketed in exceptional ways. Yet the story and the film's mode of storytelling, casting, location shooting, and scale of production bear further examination. Around the World became an important event at the box office and thus encouraged the development of a mode of filmmaking that would be imitated for years to come. In fact, reviews at CHAPTER FOUR the time lauded the singularity of the achievement while anticipating copycats. As one critic noted, "the only slight criticism I could possibly make of Mr. Todd's offering is that there are sure to be imitations of it, imitations that can't possibly be as good. "36 no Hollywood studio invested in the film's production. Only a few years earlier, Todd had come to Hollywood and ended up buying and losing the Del Mar horse track, which did not leave a favorable impression with the men in the movie business. Yet Hollywood powerhouse Joseph Schenck, who had been president of United Artists and cofounder of Twentieth Century Pictures with Darryl Zanuck, befriended Todd. Schenck lent Todd money on a regular basis, invested in Todd-AO, and brought in George Skouras (president of United Artists theaters, which Schenck had founded. Skouras's brother Spyros was head of Twentieth Century Fox at the time). Todd's other sources of finance were personal. He regularly borrowed money from Lorraine Manville, the asbestos heiress. With help from these private investors, Around the World would eventually be made for slightly more than $6 million, and financed otherwise entirely by Todd (with money from the sale of his piece of Todd-AO) and the personal loans from these few Todd friends. Short on money late in the shooting, Todd struck a distribution deal with United Artists that reduced his personal stakes in the movie to approximately 80 percent. This personal gamble, first on Todd-AO and then with Around the World paid off in unprecedented ways. It has been claimed that Around the World made more than $65 million in its first two years of distribution worldwide. But Mike Todd himself would never live to reinvest, spend, or lose that money; he died in a plane crash in March 1958.37 Films made on the scale of Around the World are usually referred to as epics, although until the widescreen productions of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, few comedies had been made on an epic scale. The film is neither an epic, nor a comedy, nor a mere travelogue, however. Todd, in any event, was determined to think outside the generic categories constructed by Hollywood. His Todd-AO process would reconceive not only the experience of the audience, but also the films themselves. Todd was a showman, and films in Todd-AO would be shows. This meant elevating the exhibition and being dedicated to the art of the pitch. In a speech he gave at Harvard Business School in the spring of 1957, he explained, "I think showmanship is about the most important single thing dramatizing the sale of merchan- r The Cosmopolitan Film dise in business____showmanship is probably the most important thing in public life."38 Todd insisted on elevating the exhibition environment. In a notorious battle with exhibitors, Todd refused to allowpopcorn to be sold at the screenings of films in Todd-AO. "My fight against selling popcorn in the theatre is really more a question of principle and I am not going to relax this policy regardless of the pressure put on me. I am insisting on this policy because I want to demonstrate that occasionally a show comes along that does not have to depend on popcorn to satisfy the customers. Many exhibitors have pointed out to me that popcorn saved the industry. I say that shows saved the industry."39 In the place of popcorn, the theater sold "commemorative albums," which Todd called "hardcover books." "This type of book," he explained, "and the penetration that comes from the customers taking these hardcover books home with them can sell a show and even an industry much better than a discarded pop-corn bag."40 when mike todd warned his Harvard audience "you can't fake it," he meant that film audiences had become so discerning that filmmakers had to deliver quality products. He also believed that the more knowledgeable and well traveled the audience became, the more location shoots would replace studio fabrications, as the audience's greater knowledge of the world would produce an inability to see "the real" in studio settings. Finally, he had invested in the notion that Todd-AO provided the best way of capturing the world's beauty. Although his belief in the wisdom of the audience may seem to be mere showmanship and guff, his actions confirm his sincerity. For example, when Around the World premiered, Todd sat in the audience and observed several responses, including clapping at a scene as if it had ended when it had not. Todd went back to California with the film and recut it to better match the audience's reading of the scene. He insisted to his Harvard audience that spending $500,000 to improve the film was more effective than spending $500,000 to advertise a flawed product. Not only did he promise a photographic hyperrealism that respond to audience expectations, but he also stressed that the shows needed to be marketed as events. In the very year that Todd made Around the World in Eighty Days, one of the great directors of the silent and classical studio era, Cecil B. DeMille, was busy digging more deeply into the arsenal of movie magic CHAPTER FOUR tools on the Paramount lot by devising an unparalleled number of special effects to remake one of his own films, The Ten Commandments*1 Mike Todd, on the other hand, believed in exploiting the world as a spectacle. While De-Mille toiled in Hollywood, Todd arrived in Chinchdn, Spain, where he hired the town's entire population of 6,500 residents to play extras at a bullfight. Both productions were enormously successful, especially at the box office; Yet critics complained that DeMille's film was a stagy and old-fashioned Victorian theatrical while they lauded Todd's film as novel, fresh, innovative, and ultimately worthy of many awards, including the Academy Award for best picture. Todd's grandiose vision and the scale of the film's production projected the notion that to be part of the film was to become a part of filmmaking his -tory and that the film's significance could also be attributed to its vast scale. The film's publicity claimed it "shattered records and precedents with Tod-dian profligacy."42 This material noted that the movie had been shot in 140 actual locations, as well as in six Hollywood studios and studios in England, Hong Kong, and Japan. It boasted having filmed 68,894 persons, establishing 2,000 camera set-ups and designing 74,685 costumes. The film's budget also expanded over time from a projected $3 million to more than $6 million. At times, simply to make payroll during the film's production, Todd had to hunt down friends with deep pockets such as Lorraine Manville and Al Streslin, who worked in "construction and real estate." Streslin ended up with 1.8 percent ownership in the film, which paid off his almost $250,000 in loans rather handsomely.43 Because Todd was first and foremost a producer, he understood his achievement in those terms: producers were the "authors of all action."44 The scale of the project would be one of his great accomplishments. While making the movie, he also made a film documenting the making of the film, suggesting that he imagined that the film would be so important that people would have an interest in understanding how he did it. As he explained, "When I first started the picture, I had this idea. I knew it was going to be [a] very difficult task, so I thought I'd start a film called Object Impossible, because all the wire guys said I must fall on my face____I had this idea of doing a documentary about the making of the picture and I have some wonderful shots."45 The documentary unit is even credited in the published materials relating to the film credits. In his speech at Harvard, Todd called the documentary an "hour and a half trailer" and spoke of possibly using it for educational purposes at Cannes or a film school.46 The film was never actually The Cosmopolitan Film made, although the extensive footage of the shooting of Around the World was used in a television special called Around the World of Mike Todd in September 1968 and written and produced by his son, Mike Todd, Jr. While pro -duction stills were a common feature of the studios, Todd's documentary may be the first example of an explicit "the making of" movie, and it suggests the importance Todd attached to the scale of the production and its international reach as one of its great accomplishments. The scale and scope of Todd's casting reflected his desire to signify the film's global reach. Aside from the vast numbers of extras employed for the making of the film, Todd sought out an array of well-known film and stage actors who would play what Todd eventually called "cameo roles." His notion of the cameo was that it would be "a gem carved in celluloid by a star." Todd legitimated the onslaught of famous names by explaining that the film's story was about "four people who go traveling. When you go traveling you meet a lot of people. It's that simple."47 Trade papers and his son's biography describe how Todd cajoled the vast number of stars—such as Frank Sinatra and the famous French comic Fernandel—into appearing in the film by using the other stars he had already signed as leverage to get them to sign on. Todd was most desperate to cast Marlene Dietrich as the madam in a San Francisco brothel, so he offered to shoot the sequence without a contract and subject it to her approval at what was close to a $250,000 bet that she would agree to print the scene. She did. The cameo roles brought actors from the past into the present: Buster Keaton, Gilbert Roland, Joe E. Brown, Beatrice Lillie. Lillie and other performers such as Noel Coward, Red Skelton, and Hermione Gingold were not exclusively known as movie stars. Finally, featuring such actors as Charles Boyer, Peter Lorre, and Dietrich foregrounded the stable of "international" stars that already resided in Hollywood. Critics appreciated the cameos and found the game of spotting the famous "bit players" an entertaining diversion. Robert Griffith noted that "the remarkable thing is that so few of them are really important as themselves, so perfectly do they lend color, vitality and authenticity to Mr. Todd's mighty spectacle."48 Another noted, "It's a neat trick and it comes off socko."49 If Todd's film would physically travel around the world, his central cast would also be drawn from around the world. The cast represented an international eclecticism. He decided immediately on David Niven to play the English protagonist, Phileas Fogg, with the cool, precise detachment that Verne had written into his spoof of the English character. Casting an 174 CHAPTER FOUR The Cosmopolitan film 175 Englishman to play an Englishman in a film in English seems perfectly unoriginal. But the casting of Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, as Phileas Fogg's French valet Passepartout, turned out to be a stroke of genius. Cantinflas was at the time the greatest star of the Mexican cinema, though he had never before appeared in an English-language film. His casting was both idiosyncratic and difficult to achieve, but it later proved to yield great returns. Todd had earlier met Cantinflas and his manager Jacques Gelman while vacationing in Mexico with the actress Evelyn Keyes (with whom Todd had been involved for the severalyears before and during the filming). Keyes knew Cantinflas from her experience making films in Mexico. Cantinflas was a nimble, physical comic who has been regularly compared to Charlie Chaplin. Todd considered him "the greatest performer I have ever in my life had the experience of being connected with" and insisted that "his comedy is universal, because it's based on pathos."50 He had never made an English-language film, although he had been entertaining offers for years, because he refused to adapt his character to the interests of foreign producers and because he was also known in Mexico for a verbal patter that he knew would be lost in translation.51 Cantinflas made sense as Todd's choice in several ways. Todd was, no doubt, thinking about a box-office draw for targeted sectors of the worldwide audience. In fact, Todd agreed to pay the Mexican star a percentage of the gross box office in Spanish-speaking territories. Cantinflas also topped the salary scale for the film as its highest paid performer, suggesting that Todd also respected and recognized him as a star, treatment which might not have come as easily from a mainstream Hollywood producer embedded in a system that had for the most part denoted a star's value mainly within the Hollywood context. Casting Cantinflas shaped the film's episodes in important ways. As Ernest Anderson, who worked for Todd, wrote in a letter to John Huston at the end of April 1955: Coming in from the airport, I gathered the director will be John Farrow, Harry Tugand is writing the script, Cantinflas plays Passepartout and David Niven, Fogg. And, says Mike, wait'llyou see the bullfight scene. Knowing that Spain or Mexico were never locations for 80 days and since Mike's dialogues were so fragmentary and sporadic as we drove in, I quite innocendy asked, "What's the name of the picture? Mike says, "what are you a wise guy or something? Around the World in 80 Days." So I guess they are interpolating some of Cantinflas' block comedy numbers. The picture goes into production June 6.52 ■■1 Bill The film did not start its production in June, but two months later for its ninety-two days of shooting. Cantinflas played Passepartout as a "Hispanic" Latin and not a French one. The character* s name and origins remained opaque in the context of the film. In the hands of Verne, Passepartout's Frenchness anchored the story as an observation of both the world and the imperturbable British, seen from the French point of view. The fact that the story was French in origin but played otherwise suggests the porous way in which French culture could be easily assimilated into a generalized "Western" culture.53 In casting Cantinflas, Todd must have been thinking about the various "spectacular episodes" of physical comedy he would film that did not rely on dialogue, thus facilitating the translatability of the film worldwide. Other casting choices also would have been unlikely studio choices. The role of Inspector Fix, Fogg's nemesis, went to a well-known English character actor with a well-known drinking problem: Robert Newton, who died right after the film was shot. Finally, Todd decided, two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin, to cast Hollywood newcomer Shirley MacLaine in the female lead as the British-educated Indian Princess Aouda, who j oins Fogg and Passepartout for the second half of their journey. None of the production materials suggest that Todd ever considered hiring an Indian actress but, it must also be said that in this way the film repeats Verne's literal elevation of Aouda through her "whitewashing" since the novel describes her as "white as a European."54 And yet, in other ways, the film's global aspirations were many. Its comprehensive quality suggests an encyclopedic kind of globalism. Yet it also integrated elements of many cultures to project the image of covering the globe in its content. One effect of this "kitchen sink" approach was that reviewers pondered the nature of the film as such. At a moment when the very value of films and filmmaking seemed up for grabs, this film that was not a film (Todd called it a "show") appeared to reviewers as something that could help "save" the film industry. "In any formal, disciplined sense Around the World in Eighty Days is hardly a movie at all, but it is a wonderfully entertaining grab bag of treats and surprises produced on a scale reminiscent of Cecil B. DeMille and the Emperor Nero. It is a spectacular show."55 Newsweek struggled to label the film and so described it as "a travelogue, a circus, a costume piece (1870s), a review, a two-reel comedy, and an all-star revival."56 A week later, in an article that attempted to account for the phenomenal attention the film seemed to be getting, Newsweek this time cited one review that insisted that it was "A movie so new that nobody could describe 176 CHAPTER FOUR it."57 The hybrid nature of the production was part of the film's critical interest. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze paused on the paradoxical nature of the trans-nationalism of the production: "The film is made by Americans who show America from the critical perspective of an Englishman... all of it invented by a Frenchman."58 If the film's hybrid quality struck the critics, they also applauded the film's comedic elements: the witty vignettes written by S. J. Perelman, who had penned scripts for the Marx Brothers; the "British" blase attitude of Phileas Fogg in the face of remarkable sights and adventures; and the physical comedy of Cantinflas. "It is delightful entertainment and a grand spoof with plenty of delicious satire on the English and on movies themselves."59 The novel's original characterization of Phileas Fogg was a French spoof on English restraint and obsessions about time and precision. The film played this to the hilt: Fogg never looks out a window in all his travels and seems blase about the remarkable beauty of the sunsets seen from the boat, never admires the marvels of the American Western landscape, never appreciates the picturesque quality of the Asian ports. By playing it as comedy, the film also spoofed the nineteenth-century novel's bet as a bold dare. How else could a film about the impossibility of traveling around the world in eighty days be made in 1956, when one could travel the world in fewer than eighty hours? The film winked at the history of the movies. Parodies of an early Western's train attack and rescue (fig. 4.2), of an adventure film's rescue of a maiden in distress (Fogg and Passepartout save Princess Aouda from sati, the ritual burning of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre in India), of the Marx Brothers (a buffet mime between Cantinflas and Red Skelton in the San Francisco saloon) drew spectators into a familiar idiom, while their placement as episodes facilitated the audience's recognition that this was part of the joke. These comic opportunities not only winked back at silent film. Geared for a worldwide audience, Around the World in Eighty Days, cleverly integrated visual gags to broaden the film's appeal to audiences who could then follow the action without reading the subtitles. Thus, while the droll dialogue could appeal to a certain sector of the audience, the film never turned on the dialogue and easily moved forward without it. Todd had in Cantinflas a physical comic who would entertain audiences without saying a word: he would dance Flamenco, fight bulls (fig. 4.3), shoot Indians, perform in a Japanese circus, ride an ostrich, and tour Japanese temples, all without speaking. 178 CHAPTER FOUR The Cosmopolitan Film 179 Of course the big scale of production matched the notion that the world itself was big (all those people and places), but it also suggested that film would make the world not so much smaller as more accessible. Todd knew that location shots would display the virtues of Todd-AO. But the film's glo-balism was quite literal, and shooting covered thirteen different countries and 140 locations.60 The locations would deliver not only a punch of realism that exploited the Todd-AO process but would also serve as the best travelogue ever seen. Initially, skeptics raised doubts about the project of location shooting a film that was set in 1872. It was one thing to shoot on contemporary European locations as they had for Three Coins in a Fountain (Rome) and Summer Madness (Venice), but another thing altogether to use locations to shoot a historical film like Gi