Mary Poppins at 60: a dazzling Disney masterpiece that hasn’t lost its shine

To anyone who grew up with the film version of Mary Poppins – which is to say, on the 60th anniversary of its release, several generations’ worth of one-time children – the idea of it once having been new is rather hard to imagine. Mary Poppins has felt like a staple for longer than it’s even technically been of “classic” age: having grown up in the VHS era of the 80s and 90s, I recall it as an oft-repeated go-to for classrooms, babysitters and festival TV programmers alike. (In South Africa, it alternated with The Sound of Music for the plum Christmas Day afternoon slot: as an emblem of the season, Julie Andrews was one step removed from Santa Claus.)

The film’s songs, images and lingo are firmly embedded in popular culture, its fairytale vision of a London accessorised with pink cherry blossom and black umbrellas still a tourist ideal. Small children, upon learning the word, have long puzzled out the spelling of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as a challenge. At 41, I still find myself imitating Andrews’ brisk, clipped phrasing of “spit spot” when hurrying things along. Mary Poppins isn’t foremost in my mind when I do so; like so many fragments from the film, the phrase has just been absorbed into the fabric of everyday life. Can they really not have always been there?

And yet, a mere six decades ago, Disney’s Mary Poppins – a brighter, more buoyant creation than the droll, surprisingly low-key PL Travers books that inspired the film – was not only new, but enthrallingly so: a state-of-the-art technical marvel, a glitzy launchpad for a first-time movie star, and a rare children’s entertainment that crossed over into grownup event film status, largely by dint of being fashioned as a full-scale Hollywood musical.

By 1964, the Walt Disney brand was not running at full creative strength. Mary Poppins was their fifth release of the year, and the previous four – A Tiger Walks, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, The Three Lives of Thomasina and The Moon-Spinners, a dud vehicle for the studio’s golden girl Hayley Mills – had made little impact between them. The previous year, in an inauspicious forecast of Disney’s future, they had released their first two sequels: Savage Sam, a follow-up to Old Yeller, bombed, while Son of Flubber performed well enough without topping The Absent-Minded Professor. The trademark Disney magic was in short supply.

On paper, Mary Poppins might not have looked an obvious exception. Travers’ whimsical books about a supernatural nanny and her charges were charming, episodic and not overtly cinematic; director Robert Stevenson had become an in-house Disney mainstay, proficient but not especially inspired; Dick Van Dyke, the biggest name in the cast, was a TV star but not an obvious blockbuster draw. The film was originally mooted as a vehicle for the American musical theatre star Mary Martin as Poppins, with Mills, fresh from Pollyanna, as the cherubic Jane Banks; later in the pre-production process, Angela Lansbury was considered as Poppins, and a rather long-in-the-tooth Cary Grant as her Cockney pal Bert.

Perhaps the film could have been made exactly as it was – with all its loving craftsmanship, sprightly musicality and trailblazing fusion of live action and animation – without Andrews and still been an equivalent phenomenon, though at this point it’s like trying to envision The Wizard of Oz without Judy Garland. For all the expertly moving parts and Disney machinery on display in Mary Poppins – Richard and Robert Sherman’s violently earwormy songs chief among them – Andrews feels like the incalculable X factor that makes it all work. Still untested on screen, Andrews had been the toast of Broadway in My Fair Lady, only for Warner Bros to pass her over in favour of Audrey Hepburn for the film version. She thus came to Mary Poppins with the point to prove that she could carry a film – that she didn’t just have stage-trained finesse as a musical comedienne, but closeup charisma too.

What she proceeded to deliver was one of the most simultaneously emphatic and eccentric star-is-born debuts in cinema history: all sweetness and sauce, English-rose ingenuousness and guarded mystique. The practically-perfect-in-every-way governess of Travers’ books may have been a magical and benevolent figure, but she wasn’t an entirely cuddly one: possessed of a coolly authoritarian streak, a prim defensiveness of her personal privacy, an air of womanly knowledge beyond the bounds of childhood. (What do she and Bert get up to on the London rooftops once the kids are in bed?)

Andrews’ performance preserves all the character’s wholesome-sinister contradictions. Her unimprovably cut-glass enunciation is as precise as her wind-blown origins and objectives remain teasingly, winkingly vague; musically, she’s a witchily ethereal lullaby balladeer in one number, and a lusty music hall entertainer in the next. Travers famously loathed Disney’s interpretation of her books, seeing the film as unduly sentimentalised and Americanised. (Van Dyke’s famously appalling Cockney accent can’t have helped on the latter score.) But if her objections extended to Andrews, she was being ungenerous: the star’s subtle suggestion of cruelty in Poppins’ otherwise rosy veneer is what keeps the film, all these years later, elastic and intriguing, like the vital dash of vinegar that gives a pavlova body and tang. It’s surely what won Andrews the best actress Oscar, in one of the most atypical roles ever to nab the award.

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Years ago, a re-edited trailer for Mary Poppins went viral by fashioning the cheery kids’ romp as a Gothic horror film, complete with Exorcist-style spinning heads, though that was already a little behind the curve. The real reason that Mary Poppins endures, amid all its tuneful cheeriness, is that there is already something a little frightening, a little uncanny, about the film and its mysterious heroine. It’s that frisson of the unknown and the unexplainable that keeps children and adults alike under its spell – a suggestion of otherworldly chaos, unresolved by the film’s lilting, kite-flying finale, that remains rare in Disney’s tidy, relentlessly focus-grouped family fare.

Subsequent attempts by the Mouse House to recapture its magic have only proven what’s so seductive and elusive about the film in the first place. Bedknobs and Broomsticks from 1971 was a naked attempt to repeat the formula, with Stevenson and the Shermans back on board, cartoon interludes, a romanticised English period setting and Lansbury in place of Andrews – but it felt like a filmed equation, all twee zaniness and forced gaiety. Mary Poppins Returns, the long-belated sequel from 2018, attempted to function as both sequel and faithful retread, but was too mired in nostalgic homage to float: the join-the-dots accuracy of Emily Blunt’s affectionate Andrews mimicry and composer Marc Shaiman’s Sherman Brothers pastiche only served to remind audiences of what was so bracing and peculiar about the original.

The 2013 Disney film Saving Mr Banks effectively acted as the studio’s valentine to itself for making Mary Poppins in the first place. Its dramatisation of the creative differences between Tom Hanks’ folksy Walt Disney and Emma Thompson’s brittle PL Travers, only mildly compelling in itself, acted as a feature-length reminder that, back in 1964, Disney made all the right calls. We already have Mary Poppins for that; moreover, as the modern-day Disney corporation endlessly plunders its own archive for sundry sequels and remakes and spinoffs, it’s hard to imagine which of their contemporary products might merit such a tribute in 60 years’ time.