February 27, 2009: Mary Poppins
Ah, Mary Poppins (1964). The one-two punch of this and The Sound of Music the following year brought Julie Andrews to well-deserved stardom like a rocket, and gave children and adults alike two timeless classic films about singing nannies. But Mary Poppins was the one who could fly.
I had seen Mary Poppins before, but I can’t guarantee that I had seen it within the past 25 years. I’ve always had the impression that it rises above the usual middling Disney pap from the 1960s (director Robert Stevenson was also associated with the Herbie movies, Son of Flubber, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and The AbsentMinded Professor), but I’m not so sure anymore. To be fair, there are great performances by Julie Andrews and particularly Dick Van Dyke, but they are strait-jacketed to a certain extent by the contrived plot. It seems to be just a goofy story built to allow a bunch of singing, which generally doesn’t appeal to me. It’s good for the kids, but I can do without it.
This is a tale of parents and their two children in 1910 England. The kids keep running their nannies ragged, and the father has put out a “help wanted” ad to hire yet another poor soul to look after them. Mary Poppins, possibly with the aid of some magic, ends up winning the job and while she is strict and no-nonsense when it comes to following the rules, the kids quickly take a shine to her as she shows them experiences, again possibly with the aid of some magic, which no other nanny has ever shown them before. What is the purpose of Mary Poppins? Well, the father, a dull banker, eventually comes to appreciate the good things in life, so one might assume that was the point, but it was apparently was not that way in the book.
(The film is based on a series of books which had been read by my wife and son who accompanied me in this viewing, so I got the always-appreciated running commentary about things which were “not in the book”.)
As mentioned earlier, Dick Van Dyke adds a lot to this. I really liked his energetic goofiness, and he really seems to connect with the kids. Julie Andrews is charming in her way, but her strict nanny behaviour, interspersed with the contrasting whimsical journeys on which she takes the children, somehow didn’t click with me. In thinking about this, I realized that I couldn’t tell whether she was really fun or really strict or actually struggling herself to figure out which she is. The third act of the film hints at this inner conflict, as she has to leave but maybe doesn’t really want to. The movie has a LOT of songs, but most of them are well-placed, and many of them are as well-known as those in The Sound of Music, such as Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and A Spoonful of Sugar. Julie Andrews, with her tremendous voice, good looks and enigmatic performance, won her a Best Actress Oscar for this star-making turn which has led to a career in which she has pushed limits and really been able to do her own thing.
I had for some reason thought that Mary Poppins was shot in Super Panavision 70 or one of the other large formats used in the 1960s for the big epics, so I was surprised to see the 1.66:1 aspect ratio when we started watching, but this was the typical European aspect ratio at the time and was fine once I got used to it. I had thought that the film might benefit from the epic scale of the wider field, but as I’ve considered it, it seems that maybe Mary Poppins is indeed better suited to the more intimate frame of the narrower field.
Mary Poppins is a product of the moviegoing appetites of its time, and that has to be considered. There are good songs, unique characters, and maybe some moral lessons mixed in, but it’s from an era when movies for kids weren’t so carefully constructed as to fully entertain adults as well. It deserves its classic status, but that doesn’t mean I need to see it more often than every quarter-century.
Unquestionable classic, but of its time.
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