Robert Stevenson (1964)
Despite Julie Andrews’ success in stage productions on both sides of the Atlantic, Jack Warner didn’t want her for the screen version of My Fair Lady and, to Andrews’ great disappointment, cast Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. Virtually on the rebound, Andrews accepted Walt Disney’s offer of the title role in Mary Poppins. As P L Travers’ magical nanny, Julie Andrews triumphed, winning an Oscar for what was her big-screen debut. This is a famously happy accident of Hollywood casting history and Mary Poppins, for this filmgoer, is a stand-out happy memory of childhood cinemagoing, never mind that was a rare event. Mary Poppins was released in Britain just before Christmas 1964; I think my mum must have taken me to see it at the York Odeon sometime the following year, when I was nine. I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I was much more ambivalent about The Sound Music, which Mum and I saw on a pilgrimage to Leeds the following summer[1]. Sixty years on, I hold to my original preference for Robert Stevenson’s live-action-plus-animation musical fantasy, with songs by the Sherman brothers, Richard M and Robert B. Mary Poppins is still terrific.
Open umbrella in one hand, carpet bag in the other, Mary Poppins descends from the sky into Edwardian London in 1910, and arrives at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, the home of George Banks (David Tomlinson), whose surname is a clue to his occupation, and his wife Winifred (Glynis Johns), a scatty suffragette. Mary will be nanny to the couple’s two children, Jane (Karen Dotrice) and her younger brother Michael (Matthew Garber), who’ve been getting through nannies like loaves of bread: the latest (Elsa Lanchester) exits the Banks home in high dudgeon at the start of the film. On her first visit to the nursery with her two young charges, Mary Poppins uses an extraordinary tape measure to reveal their personality traits: Michael is ‘Extremely stubborn and suspicious’, Jane ‘Rather inclined to giggle, doesn’t put things away’. The children want Mary to measure herself and she obliges: the answer is ‘Practically perfect in every way’.
That’s Julie Andrews to a T – and it’s what usually makes her hard to tolerate in films. In The Sound of Music, she sets your teeth in edge whether as a chaotic tomboy at the start or a romantic heroine in the later stages: she’s so completely efficient you don’t believe in either version of Maria von Trapp. Andrews’ role in Mary Poppins draws very effectively on her native head-girl quality. Mr Banks places an advertisement in The Times for a no-nonsense nanny who’ll keep Jane and Michael in strict order. In their duet ‘The Perfect Nanny’, Jane and Michael compose their own advert: they have someone much more sympathetic in mind. Their father tears up the children’s version and chucks the pieces on the fire, from which they rise phoenix-like and reassemble. In her job interview, Mary confounds Mr Banks by quoting from the junior Bankses’ person spec. She’s an instant hit with the children and, as such, is soon alarming her employer. Mary Poppins is a dream nanny in that she works magic and makes everything turn out for the best – but since she’s also Julie Andrews, George Banks isn’t entirely thwarted. Andrews’ Mary is bossy, must always be in charge and expects to be admired by all and sundry (though she’s not above receiving a compliment coyly). Her enunciation is flawless, her singing crystalline, her dancing highly competent. All admirable, of course, but it means you enjoy even more those occasional moments – during Uncle Albert (Ed Wynn)’s ‘I Love to Laugh’ number, for example – when Mary loses control of a situation. Mary Poppins is unquestionably Julie Andrews’ finest cinema hour.
Where Andrews’ portrait of Mary is celebrated, Dick Van Dyke’s contribution is notorious, because of his Cockney accent. This is ludicrously unfair. I think Van Dyke’s performance in Mary Poppins – as Bert, the jack-of-all-trades who knows Mary of old – is among the most underrated in film musical history. Yes, the Cockney vowels are all over the place; the feelings behind them – which Dick Van Dyke expresses effortlessly – are always spot on, regardless of what Bert’s doing in the story. He’s a one-man-band, then a pavement artist, most famously a chimney sweep, finally a seller of kites. He’s a pal and, within inevitably decorous limits, a kind of beau to Mary. He reassures Jane and Michael, because he’s kind of heart and a kid at heart – the lesson that the children’s exasperated father, whose unofficial confidant Bert becomes, must learn over the course of the story. In the lovely, fantastical ‘Jolly Holiday’ episode, Van Dyke dances with Julie Andrews, and with cartoon penguins: with the former, he’s charming and gentlemanly, with the latter a wonderful physical clown. Everything he does in the film radiates warmth and humour, and unbelievable joie de vivre. No wonder Dick Van Dyke has lived to be a hundred.
The perfect casting goes well beyond the leading lady and man. Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber had already acted together yet their shared eccentricity here feels fresh. Even at the start, as he sings ‘The Life I Lead’, a hymn to middle-class Edwardian male self-satisfaction, we can see that George Banks will be a thwarted patriarch. David Tomlinson’s essential bumbling benignity is soon peeping through: Mr Banks’ indignant detachment from his children would be hard to take without it. Glynis Johns is hardly stretched as his wife, but likeably distinctive, nonetheless. (Like her banker husband, Winifred has her mind on other things. Her political interests are presented, a bit jarringly as it seems now, as something she’ll grow out of, for the sake of her children. Her suffragette’s sash is eventually used as the tail for the family kite that Mr Banks puts together.) Angela Baddeley is enjoyably broad as the housemaid, Ellen. Jane Darwell (Ma Joad in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath) has a memorable cameo as the elderly bird lady on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Although most of the Shermans’ songs have simple melodies, ‘Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)’ is, despite its heavenly choir, affecting; ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ is vividly mysterious; and the genuine sense of elevation in the ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’ tune makes this joyful closing number truly elating. The song lyrics are consistently witty and enjoyable. I had just a few reservations about Mary Poppins when I first saw it. I’m afraid I stand by those, too. When the robin appears at the nursery window in ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’, I can’t have been the only British kid to think, ‘That’s not a proper robin!’ – and not because the bird is animatronic. The anomaly has now earned its place in IMDb’s ‘goofs’ section on the film: ‘The robin that lands on Mary’s finger … is an American robin (Turdus migratorius), not a British robin (Erithacus rubecula)’. Talk about cultural imperialism … I recall a friend’s mother enthusing about the brilliant choreography for the sweeps’ ‘Step in Time’ across the rooftops. As a child, I got bored with this and, though I can now see why people raved about it, I still think it goes on too long.
Otherwise, though, the 139 minutes of Mary Poppins whiz by. Jane and Michael are soon asking Mary to promise she won’t leave them: she’s clear from the start that she ‘will stay until the wind changes’ – which seems to happen far too soon. As she flies up and away over the London skyline, Bert looks up, bids Mary farewell, and asks her not to stay away too long. Julie Andrews’ casting isn’t the only element of Mary Poppins mythology now: Walt Disney’s negotiations with P L (Pamela) Travers over the film rights to her books, also became famous a few years ago, through Saving Mr Banks (2013). There are some good things in that film – and in the subsequent Mary Poppins Returns sequel (2018) – but neither is a patch on Robert Stevenson’s original.
Combining live action and animation was far from new – Disney himself had used it as far back as the 1920s and in The Three Caballeros (1945) – but Mary Poppins was recognised as a technological advance in the field. Maybe those who understand special visual effects better than me have been smiling indulgently at the film for decades. Even I can see that some of this technical wizardry looks primitive now, but I must admit I find the primitiveness part of the magic: Mary’s infinitely capacious carpet bag (it contains, inter alia, a large cake with pink icing, a hat stand and a full-sized floor lamp) and the sequence in which she, Jane and Michael tidy up the nursery, are more appealing thanks to the box-of-tricks quality of the effects. There’s always something inventive and engaging to look at in the film, yet Robert Stevenson retains a reliably light touch. (It was striking to return to Mary Poppins just a couple of weeks after seeing Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day – dismaying evidence that the most technically gifted filmmakers of today feel compelled to wow largely adult audiences relentlessly, coercively.) Mary Poppins’ last, simple special effect appears at the end of the cast list in the closing titles. The role of old Mr Dawes, the senior partner at the Fidelity Fiduciary where George Banks works, is played, say the credits, by NAVCKID KEYD. The letters of this highly exotic name separate and finally unscramble themselves, to reveal the name of DICK VAN DYKE, the unsung hero of this enduringly delightful film.
8 July 2026
[1] It was alleged at the time that The Sound of Music was just too ‘big’ to be shown in York. I’ve long assumed this was urban/school playground legend, but Google AI says otherwise: ‘When The Sound of Music was first released in 1965, it was filmed in a massive, ultra-wide format known as 70mm Todd-AO. …Because of this, 20th Century Fox initially restricted the movie’s premiere run to large, “roadshow” cinemas in major cities. These select venues had the giant, curved screens, stereophonic sound, and specialized 70mm projectors required to handle the movie’s immense visual and audio scale. … For smaller provincial cinemas in towns across Britain, this created a few challenges …..’
