Mary Poppins review – Disney’s entertainment sugar rush possesses thermonuclear brilliance
Brilliant, entrancing, exhausting, and with thermonuclear showtunes from Richard and Robert Sherman, Disney’s hybrid live-action/animation classic from 1964 is now rereleased on home entertainment platforms for its 60th anniversary. And it has a brand-new certificate from the BBFC: upgraded from a U to a PG on account of “discriminatory language” from the eccentric seadog character Admiral Boom, who fires a cannon from his roof shouting “Fight the Hottentots!” (an obsolete term for South Africa’s indigenous Khoekhoe people). However the BBFC is evidently not bothered by the foxhunting scene in which the fox has a cod Irish accent (perhaps because chimney sweep Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke, saves the fox), nor by the cheerful suicide reference made by one of the servants: “Nice spot there by Southwark Bridge, very popular with jumpers!”
In an upmarket part of Edwardian London created on almost dreamlike artificial sets in California, the prosperous upper-middle-class Banks family are having problems controlling their high-spirited children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice); this is grumpy banker George Banks (David Tomlinson) and his suffragette wife Winifred (Glynis Johns), who is always whirling around going to votes-for-women marches. Pompous Mr Banks saunters into the action with complacent song The Life I Lead (which melodically owes a tiny bit to With a Little Bit of Luck from the stage show My Fair Lady).
And so the magical nanny Mary Poppins wafts miraculously down from the heavens to solve all their problems – and this is the glorious movie debut of Julie Andrews, glowing with health and beauty and confidence. Andrews will always be associated with this superb performance, and of course her later appearance in The Sound of Music, in which she also artlessly cures a family’s woes. I have always preferred Andrews in The Sound of Music, because defying the Nazis is more exciting and worthwhile than wimpishly going on a jolly holiday, and feeding the (verminous) birds at tuppence a bag etc. But no one can doubt the lethal power of Mary Poppins. (Naming Mary’s preferred alcoholic cocktail is always a great film quiz standby.)
But when uptight Mr Banks takes the kids to his place of employment and young Michael inadvertently causes the biggest run on a bank since Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, this stern paterfamilias loses his position and is forced to consider his whole life and how he has been neglecting his children in favour of work (although happily it’s not a quandary he’s in for