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MARY POPPINS
Rating: 
USA. 1964.
Director – Robert Stevenson, Screenplay – Don Da Gradi & Bill Walsh, Based on the Books by P.L. Travers, Photography – Edward Colman, Music/Lyrics – Richard M. Sherman & Robert B. Sherman, Music Supervisor – Irwin Kostal, Special Effects – Peter Ellenshaw, Eustace Lycett & Robert A. Mattey, Animation Director – Hamilton S. Luske, Art Direction – Carroll Clark & William H. Tuntke, Animation Art Direction – McLaren Stewart, Choreography – Marc Breaux & Dee Dee Wood. Production Company – Disney.
Cast:
Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins), Dick Van Dyke (Bert/Mr Dawes Sr), Karin Dotrice (Jane Banks), Matthew Garber (Michael Banks), David Tomlinson (George W. Banks), Glynis Johns (Winifred Banks)
Plot: Young Jane and Michael Banks find the perfect new nanny when prim and proper Mary Poppins arrives, riding in on a wind-blown umbrella. Mary Poppins soon has a transforming effect on they, the household and the far too serious people around them as she takes them for mid-air tea parties, journeys into chalk drawings and dances with chimney sweeps.
When Beauty and the Beast (1991) made waves and was called the first Disney film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, everyone seemed to have forgotten Mary Poppins, which makes Beauty and the Beast the second Disney feature film to have been nominated for Best Picture. (Beauty and the Beast is however the first Disney animated feature film to be nominated for a Best Picture).
Mary Poppins is really a convergence point that combines several different 1960s cycles – Disney’s somewhat puritanical but often lively sermons on proper child-rearing from Pollyanna (1960) on through; the peculiar 1960s Hollywood musical fantasy on Victorian England (as embodied by My Fair Lady [1964]) where all the lower-classes have the most atrocious Cockney accents; and of course the anchoring point of the saintly angelic, slightly cross-eyed presence of Julie Andrews who went on to become a kind of Family Values poster queen with this and The Sound of Music (1965).
Mary Poppins is quite an appealing film. It has nothing that could really be described as a plot, rather is just a series of dance and effects sequences that have been strung together. This doesn’t particularly matter, as it is all conducted with a dizzily deadpan absurdism that hardly ever wears out its welcome. There are some quite extraordinary effects sequences – tea parties conducted up at ceiling level with flying participants; and the perhaps overlong sequence inside the chalk painting, with people dancing through animated landscapes, graceful races bobbing up and down on merry-go-round horses and a well-choreographed dance with a group of animated penguins. With prim, unruffled certainty and a kind of humourless deadpan twinkle, Julie Andrews is rather appealing, even quite sexy. Dick Van Dyke manages to compensate for an amazingly unconvincing Cockney accent with a good amount of cheer, bumbling his way through some rather good dance sequences with a exuberant unflappability. The songs – which are of a form that one doesn’t particularly like – are catchy and quite memorable. Even if the saccharine content is not to one’s liking then there is a considerable degree of downright bizarreness to Mary Poppins – images of nannies going bowling through the air in a windstorm; songs about the suffragette cause; a droll sense of humour – The Boston Tea Party is described as: “The Americans threw the tea overboard thus making the tea undrinkable – even for Americans”; and, after all, a rather anarchic message about adults learning how to be children and discovering the joys of kite-flying and dancing in one’s chimney soot.
Also of related interest is the Australian documentary The Shadow of Mary Poppins (2002), which is a biography of P.L. Travers, the creator of the original Mary Poppins stories. This spends some time covering the filming of Mary Poppins and of the relationship that existed between P.L. Travers and Walt Disney.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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