![]() ![]() Tuntke, with set decoration by Emile Kuri and Hal Gausman. ![]() The sets are by Carroll Clark and William H. Colman’s lighting is notable, such as on the rooftop ballet sequence, where the sooty figures of the chimney sweeps must be distinct but a pattern, not standouts, but phrases in a score. Edward Colman’s Technicolor photography is as lively as a child’s imagination, and the color soft as a dream. Irwin Kostal did the arranging and conducting and has made the score varied and meaningful. There are about a dozen of them, and they are all good. Arthur Malet contributes ably, and Jane Darwell lends wordless radiance to a lovely musical number. Reginald Owen is thunderous as a somewhat loony retired admiral. Arthur Treacher has an amusing bit as a constable. Elsa Lanchester is amusing as a defeated governess. Ed Wynn is in for one fine scene, where everyone floats on the ceiling. Hermione Baddeley and Reta Shaw are strong as the family’s servants. Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber are the children, and they are splendid, precocious but utterly beguiling. The construction of Mary Poppins uses songs for exposition and action, never simply diversion, and both Tomlinson and Miss Johns come in strongly as singing actors. Glynis Johns is endearing as the mother, happy as a lark at getting chained to a lamp post for the cause - women’s rights. And for good measure, plays a second role, an elderly man who is extremely funny and totally different from his principal role.ĭavid Tomlinson is fine as the father, the very model of a harassed bank official. ![]() Van Dyke demonstrates comedy gifts, and dancing and singing, he has only partially unveiled in the past. Miss Andrews is sweet and pert, with her crystalline voice enchanting on the songs. Miss Andrews and Van Dyke are the pinwheels of the action. Cotton Warburton’s editing is the key to much of this, and he has given the film itself a tempo that is matched, with both assisting the other, by the music. Luske, animation art director McLaren Stewart and the gifted men who assisted them. Since these artists usually don’t get full credit, credit should go to animation director Hamilton S. The scene, for instance, in which Mary Poppins teaches her children how much fun it is to clean up their room, in which objects whisk magically to their appointed places. It is done for total value, and the sequences are unfailingly good, not just trickery. There is repeated use of “flying,” done so wonderfully that the mechanics never shows. There is the combination of live and animated figures, done in such sequences as Van Dyke dances with four penguins. As a result the film is loaded with unusual cinematic skills. The impressive thing about the conception of Mary Poppins is that Disney, Stevenson, Walsh and DaGradi apparently decided what would be right, not feasible, and then set the many departments to work creating without reference to the impossible. And accomplished with so much skill and novelty and joyous good spirits that it seems as bright as tomorrow. Tucked away in the midst of these high-flying dreams and Technicolor fantasies, is a theme: that daddy should not sacrifice his family to his work that mother should attend to home and hearth. They see real men and women flying through the air with the ease of pigeons. Mary’s charges flip into a cartoon world. ![]() Her approach, like that in Oz and Peter Pan, and indeed all the great children’s classics, is to open the mind as an entrance to the imagination. Trim, neat and efficient, she makes work into fun, and fun into hilarity. She descends to earth, like some Edwardian Superman, to take charge of the family. Mary Poppins, clearly a figure of supernatural power, is first seen sailing serenely over London sitting primly on a cloud. The family is a disorganized one with father scrabbling for money, mother agitating for women’s votes and the children occupied in establishing their independence through the demoralization of a succession of governesses. The title character, played by Julie Andrews, is a governess in an English family, circa 1910. There is a child’s magic about Mary Poppins, but also a tart realism that rescues it at every turn from cuteness. Someone once said that Peter Pan was not only about a little boy who wouldn’t grow up, but sounded as if it were written by a little boy who wouldn’t grow up. In some ways it resembles Peter Pan, except that it’s better. Bill Walsh did the screenplay with Don DaGradi, from the Mary Poppins books by P.L. ![]()
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