The New Pictures

Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Todd). An epidemic of giantism is currently sweeping the movie world. George Stevens' Giant, the latest of the cinemonsters, runs well over three hours.

War and Peace lasts 3 1/2. The Ten Commandments, which Cecil B. DeMille expects to release in the next couple of weeks, tops that by a long quarter-hour. In such company, Producer Michael Todd's mighty slice of Jules Verne's 19th century globaloney, since it is only two hours and 55 minutes long (not counting intermission), seems a relative runt; but what the thing lacks in length it more than makes up in what showmen call "holler."

For his first independent film production, the man one show-business wag has referred to, with friendly incredulity, as "Todd Almighty," assembled no fewer than 46 stars of stage, screen, radio and TV. Among the hit-players: Charles Boyer, Joe E. Brown, Martine Carol, John Carradine. Charles Coburn, Ronald Colman, Melville Cooper, Noel Coward, Reginald Denny. Marlene Dietrich, Fernandel, Sir John Gielgud, Hermione Gingold, Jose Greco. Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Trevor Howard, Glynis Johns, Buster Keaton, Evelyn Keyes, Beatrice Lillie, Edmund Lowe, Peter Lorre, A. E. Matthews, Robert Morley, Edward R. Murrow, Jack Oakie, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton.

And then, of course, there is the supporting cast: 68,894 people and 7,959 animals-including four ostriches, six skunks, 15 elephants, 17 fighting bulls, 512 rhesus monkeys, 800 horses, 950 burros, 2,448 American buffalo, 3,800 Rocky Mountain sheep and a sacred cow that eats flowers on cue. The film took 34 directors 160 days to make on 112 locations and 140 sets in 13 countries. And the wardrobe department alone spent $410.000 to provide 74,685 costumes and 36,092 trinkets, while Todd's makeup men claim to have glued 15,612 beards-including a number of magnificent Dundrearies-presumably to the same number of chins.

To top it all off. Producer Todd took his picture on the world's largest film-exactly twice as wide (70 mm.) as the normal Hollywood stock-and has projected it on one of the world's largest indoor screens-a vast concave gullet that opens almost as wide as Cinerama, and possesses much of the same power to suck the spectator out of his seat. Not content with that, Todd flooded this huge surface with a light almost twice as intense as any ever seen onscreen before, and so hot that the film has to be refrigerated as it passes through the Todd-AO projector.

The wonder is that this Polyphemus of productions does not simply collapse of its own overweight; but, thanks principally to Showman Todd, the picture skips along with an amazing lightness-like a fat lady winning a cha-cha contest. As a travelogue, Around the World is at least as spectacular as anything Cinerama has slapped together. The customer is offered an album of house-high snapshots of summer in Paris, corridas in Spain, religious festivals in India, a Wild West show in the hoariest Hollywood tradition; and at one point he is even permitted to witness a sight that the 19th century would cheerfully have given its right sideburn to see: Queen Victoria in bed.

S. J. Perelman's script*moreover, is a deft, witty spoof of Verne's book, which in turn was a spoof of the English, so that the moviegoer often experiences the refined pleasures of laughing at a man who is laughing at somebody else. The main roles are competently carried out by David Niven, Shirley MacLaine and the late Robert Newton, and most of the big stars are effectively scattered about the picture, like sequins on an elephant. But the star of stars is the famous Mexican comic, Cantinflas. In his first U.S. movie, he gives delightful evidence that he may well be, as Charles Chaplin once said he was, "the world's greatest clown."

Except for his size, there is nothing small about brash, bouncy, blue-eyed, wisecracking Mike Todd. Confessing last week that Around the World had cost him $6,000,000, Showman Todd apologized, "I'm ashamed to admit it, it cost so little. Take The Ten Commandments. That cost $1,000,000 a commandment."

In addition to pouring cash and energy into the film. Todd demonstrated that he could put the stamp of his personality on it. It is brassy, extravagant, long-winded and funny. The Todd personality has been developed over a career dedicated to an unremitting pursuit of the elusive buck.

He was born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen in Minneapolis, the son of an impoverished Polish rabbi, grew up in Chicago to become Mike Todd, his own special creation. He got off to a fast start at eight, playing poker and shooting dice. At twelve he was running an established but impermanent floating crap game. Since then, in one way or another, he has never stopped gambling. He asserts, probably correctly, that he is the only man ever to lose a race track on a horse race.

He began in show business by combining sex and spectacle at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. His show was called the Flame Dance. A girl dressed in gauzy wings, representing a moth, danced closer and closer to a huge candle until she caught fire and ran off apparently naked. Says Todd: "I burned up four girls before I got it." It was a hit. After that there were other hits, other flops, but almost all had either sex or spectacle or both. He did The Hot Mikado ("The only show I ever produced that I liked"), Star and Garter, his first Broadway smash hit, Cole Porter's Mexican Hayride, Catherine Was Great with Mae West, the G.I. Hamlet with Maurice Evans, and an involuntary bit in court, where he was declared bankrupt. Continuing to live lavishly, Todd said, "I was a million in the hole. What was I supposed to do, cut down on my cigars?"

Six years ago Todd helped lead the big-screen revolution when he got into the movie business in a big way with Cinerama. When he got out of Cinerama at a pleasant profit he parlayed the entire packet on a process he thought even better, Todd-AO. When he got out of Todd-AO, he put it all on Around the World, had to borrow more to make the distance. Two days before the opening, as he was struggling to raise the last $162,000 for the final payment, a syndicate offered to buy him out for $10 million plus 20% of the profits. Todd refused. "I gambled right up to the wire," he said. "I'll keep going with it."

Todd has never had a hit of such potential dimensions. Having gotten Around the World, he is now sitting on top of it. His plans? Says the man who is pushing 50 as if he intends to knock it over: "As soon as the excitement dies down, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I worked for it, I owe it to myself and nobody is going to deprive me of it."

Wee Geordie (Gilliat & Launder; George K. Arthur). "ARE YOU UNDERSIZED? LET ME MAKE A DIFFERENT MAN OF YOU!" Wee Geordie's heart gave a glorious thump as he read the ad in the Drumfechan Clarion. He was undersized indeed; so wee a bairn of ten years old was hardly to be seen in all the glen. At school he had to stand on a box to reach the blackboard, and when he went walking with bonny Jean, she was half a head taller than he. That very night, with the courage of desperation, the thrifty young Scotsman scraped his last bob from the back of the bureau drawer and sent off for the Henry Samson Body-Building Course.

It came; or rather, the first lesson came-a fine, fat envelope that proved to contain a small booklet of simple exercises and a mighty stack of inspirational literature ("Today I may be frail and weak,But soon I shall be tough as teak").

Wee Geordie was inspired, and away he rushed, as fast as his skinny little legs would carry him, down "the royal road to health and fitness." To the horror of his parents, the road seemed to be paved with Lsd. To the certain delight of millions of moviegoers, it has also been pot-holed by British Moviemakers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder with some grand comic surprises.

Ten years passed, ten years of unremitting sweat, in which Wee Geordie threw a sockful of good shillings after bad exercises. And what had he got to show for all of his trouble? Well, as a matter of fact, he was just about 6 ft. 6 and hard as bricks. Whether by the grace of God or the works of Henry Samson, Wee Geordie (Bill Travers) turned out to be the biggest and the brawest laddie from Ecclefechan to Papa Westray. He was a nice, gentle giant-or, depending on the point of view, a big dumb ox. He thought of nothing but his muscles, and as far as bonny Jean (Norah Gorsen) could tell, he would rather grab a bar bell than a girl.

One day Henry Samson wrote Geordie a letter that contained a revolutionary proposal: now that you have all that muscle, why not use it for some practical purpose? "In Scotland," Samson went on, "the tendency is to throw things. I think you should throw something. Geordie." Geordie was electrified. He promptly picked up a sledge hammer and threw it halfway to the coast of Norway. The laird (Alastair Sim) happened at the time to be stalking a capercaillie in the gorse, saw the thing go flying by, and nigh jumped out of his baggy tweeds. In no time at all, Geordie was winding up for his first throw at the Drumfechan games.

Geordie threw, and Geordie won by such an impressive margin that he was haled away to Australia with the British Olympic team, but there at last he met his match: a 6-ft. lady shotputter named Helga. What happens next is probably the meatiest love affair known to show business since Barnum publicized Jumbo and Alice, and it is certainly one of the funniest in years. The moviegoer should have a thoroughly silly good time just sitting and watching two people make beautiful muscles together.

The Best Things in Life Are Free (20th Century-Fox). The trouble with most movies that tell the success story of a famous figure in show business is that they are all success and no story: the producers all too often eliminate the key facts of the fellow's life at the insistence of lawyers and relatives, or even in the interests of good taste. To correct this defect, Author John (Ten North Frederick) O'Hara has developed an idea that may in future save the public ear from being so painfully chewed by Hollywood's more persistent ego beavers. He has written a "biopic" without a bio. The heroes of this latest vanity film are Lew Brown, Ray Henderson and the late Buddy de Sylva, the well-known Tin Pan Alley team of the '203. But the story is the story of three other guys: O'Hara just made it up. Furthermore, he made it (with the help of William Bowers and Phoebe Ephron) into pretty much the sort of simpleminded, dimple-kneed doohickey a musicomedy book should be.

According to the film, De Sylva, Brown and Henderson (Gordon MacRae, Ernest Borgnine and Dan Dailey) were Broadway characters as salty as the waiters in Lindy's, and for most of the distance they give the customer a pretty fair run for his money. MacRae lays his wad on fast women, Borgnine on slow horses, and Dailey gives his paycheck to the ever-loving wife. But they all get together to write pretty little ditties (Sonny Boy, Black Bottom, Button Up Your Overcoat, Birth of the Blues), and Sheree North is usually around to sing them. The show glides along, smooth as a Detroit Air Cooled ("buoyant readability")-a dependable vehicle for those who long to be carried back to the days when the girls did the flea hop in short skirts, and the demand for violin cases was curiously in excess of the demand for violins.

*A credit now being contested in court by Scriptwriter James Poe.

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