THE DEATH of Mike Todd, perhaps the last of the
old-style megalomaniacs, could hardly have occurred, even from natural causes, without a good deal of publicity. As it is, the thousands of words that have been written about him have left me with little to say. Yet it is typical of the impact made by this extraordinary man that I should feel the need to say something. Small, ugly, almost pathologically loquacious, he stood out from the ruck of show-business 'personalities' as nobody had done since the long-past heyday of Sam Goldwyn. It is diffidult to account for his astonish- ing impact, particularly when one realises that for those in this country his reputation rested entirely on the acres of rubbish printed about him in the popular newspapers, almost all of it lies, and one film. But what a film ! Around the World in 80 Days struck me when I first saw it, sandwiched between the lunatic hurly-burly that preceded its opening of the Cannes Film Festival and the incredible party (live lions and all) that followed it, as a superb piece of work. It had (as all Todd's work had to have) `everything'; but it had some- thing else. It had heart—a gay, gusty heart, a superbly optimistic spirit, a remarkably humble self-mockery. It is an essay in human understand- ing more real (and likely to be more successful) than many a solemn treatise. It is no coincidence that the next film its creator had planned was Den Quixote. I shall always remember my last glimpse of him, at the Battersea Pleasure Gardens party that followed the London opening of his film, a cigar revolving incessantly above a blue jowl, snapping angrily at the television cameramen : `C'mon, c'mon, what are we making, a full-length feature?' He should have died hereafter.
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