2. Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love Mary Poppins, and those who love Mary Poppins but are ashamed to admit it.

*****

Some say there isn’t a word in the English language that could adequately describe Mary Poppins. On the contrary, there’s a very good word. It’s …

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, if you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious …

*****

Shortly after I turned 17, both of us in the mood to watch a diverting, old-fashioned musical, my father and I rented Gigi from the video store. Several factors suggested a good time was coming our way: 1) it was the Best Picture winner of 1958; 2) it was highly rated by every film guide I had at my disposal; 3) it featured the presence of Hermione Gingold (AKA Mrs. Shinn from The Music Man). How could we lose?

Two icky, confused hours later, my father and I agreeing that its queasy ephebophilia hadn’t aged so hot, and neither of us being too impressed by the songs either (“Thank Heaven for Little Girls”? I don’t know Maurice Chevalier, let me consult my parole officer), my father took a breath and said, “Well that didn’t quite do it. Hey, you know what we should rent instead? You want to see a musical that’s actually good? You probably haven’t seen it since you were a kid. We should rent Mary Poppins.”

Hmm … Not high on my list of classics to tackle, pops, but … well, when was the last time I’d seen Mary Poppins? Hazy recollections of it resided in the same mental compartment of my brain reserved for The Parent Trap, Swiss Family Robinson, Pete’s Dragon, and other live-action Disney films made before the studio rediscovered its animated mojo in the ‘80s with The Fox and the Hound and The Great Mouse Detective.

Wasn’t there a scene where Dick Van Dyke goes underground into the sewer system and starts dancing with birds or something? And Mary serves the kids drugs in a spoon? My pre-internet go-to movie resource, the CD-ROM Cinemania, featured a 20-second clip of “Chim Chim Cher-ee” on it, and merely playing that 20-second clip brought back pungent associations of smokestacks and umbrellas and turn-of-the-century London and working-class yobs prancing around on rooftops, but … it was all a blur.

There was nothing I loved more at that age than telling my father he was wrong about something, but as jaded 17-year-old me sat there in front of the TV revisiting Mary Poppins, I soon realized I had to eat crow (eat soot?). I think I know the exact moment in the film that did it.

In college, I had a friend whose favorite movie was Pulp Fiction, and he used to tell me the exact moment when he knew, while watching Pulp Fiction in the theater for the first time, that it would become his favorite movie. “When Tim Roth asks Jules which wallet in the bag is his, and Jules tells him, ‘It’s the one that says “Bad Motherfucker.”’ And I thought, if he pulls out the wallet, and if they actually show a shot of the wallet and it says ‘Bad Motherfucker’ on it, then I am watching the greatest movie ever made.”

Well. Approximately 30 minutes into Mary Poppins, Mary measures Michael with a tape measure, then Jane. When Michael expresses doubt that he measures “Extremely Stubborn and Suspicious,” Mary shows him the tape measure to prove it. After Jane learns that she measures “Rather Inclined to Giggle, Doesn’t Put Things Away,” she asks Mary, “How about you?” Hesitating for a moment, Mary measures herself. “As I expected. Mary Poppins: Practically Perfect in Every Way.” And I thought: if they actually show a shot of the tape measure and it says “Mary Poppins: Practically Perfect in Every Way” on it, then I am watching the greatest movie ever made.”

*****

What’s that? Speak up?

“Mary freakin’ Poppins? Has he gone off his crumpet? As if his choice for 3^rd favorite movie of the ‘60s wasn’t corny and unhip enough, we’ve got Mary Poppins? What’s number one, The Love Bug?”

I hear you, but I don’t hear you. Sometimes people, through no fault of their own, can’t see past the end of their noses. Enough of your questions. Here’s one of mine:

When was the last time you watched Mary Poppins?

It’s a movie for kids, you say? That’s what they want you to think. The dirty little secret is that Mary Poppins isn’t for kids at all. Mary Poppins is more hardcore than Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses combined.

To watch Mary Poppins is to kiss the hand of God. To watch Mary Poppins is to dance with the shamans in the pale moonlight. To watch Mary Poppins is to traverse the liminal space between waking and dreaming. I am sometimes convinced that, within its two hours and twenty-two minutes, all the universe’s most sacred secrets can be found.

I mean, if Stanley Kubrick dug it, then so can you. From a 1968 interview: “I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but…” Yeah Stanley, you WISH you could make it.

From the very first shot, featuring a surreal matte painting of Edwardian London by Peter Ellenshaw, as trembling violins give way to French horns introducing the melody of “Feed the Birds,” the film all but declares, “An alternate state of consciousness is descending upon you.”

Mary Poppins knows things that other movies don’t. It’s a mystery film, but instead of the mystery being something banal like “Did the butler do it?,” it’s more like “Who the hell are these people, what in God’s name are they up to, and … why isn’t every movie this awesome?” As I watch it, I get the sense that, even though the ordinary family at the center of its plot possesses barely any comprehension of what is going on, somebody knows what’s going on. And, like the Banks children, I sort of want to know, and I sort of don’t want to know.

The magic doesn’t wait around. After the opening credits, the camera zooms down through a misty London park and locates Bert, in his one-man-band guise, inventing impromptu rhymes using a freeform version of “Chim-Chim-Cherie.” Why this park? Why this man? Why the bass drum attached to his back? Who can say? But he’s got the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand: “Ah, Mrs. Corry, a story for you: your daughters was shorter than you … but they grew.” The man’s in a groove. “Dear Miss Persimmon …” Hold on a minute …

Perturbed by Bert’s delay, Miss Persimmon lets out a majestically rising, comically wimpy “Yessssss?” An intimate close-up on Bert’s face says, “Sorry lady, but that rhyme is going to have to wait.”

Wind’s in the east, mist comin’ in
Like something is brewin’, about to begin
Can’t put me finger on what lies in store
But I feel what’s to ‘appen, all ‘appened before.

Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is – do you, Miss Persimmon?

The film hasn’t introduced the Banks family yet, or Admiral Boom, or Uncle Albert – hell, Mary doesn’t show up for another 25 minutes – and yet, I can’t look away. This movie could end up featuring an entire musical number based around the virtues of chimney soot, and after an opening hook like that one, I wouldn’t give a damn.

*****

These last couple of films in my countdown are really making a mockery of auteur theory.

Ask ten random people on the street to name the director of Mary Poppins, and I suspect you’d hear crickets (Jiminy Crickets?). But director Robert Stevenson was probably too busy swimming in his vast tank of gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck to care.

Unlike The Music Man’s Morton Da Costa and his whopping three directorial credits, Stevenson’s filmography is nothing to sneeze at; it’s just that when I name the films of his you might’ve heard of (Old Yeller, The Absent-Minded Professor, Bedknobs and Broomsticks), his isn’t the first name that comes to mind.

Yes, starting in 1957, Stevenson became Disney’s go-to man for live-action features. He also had quite a career before that, both in Britain and Hollywood, although out of his pre-Disney pictures, I’ve only seen Jane Eyre, which, like all movies starring Orson Welles, just makes me think of Orson Welles, not Robert Stevenson. This paragraph is probably the last time you’ll hear me mention his name. It’s never been clear to me what, precisely, on the set of Mary Poppins Stevenson did. I think his main job was to direct the actors – in which case, good job?

OK, how about the screenwriters then? As far as I can tell, Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi appear less “responstable” for the movie’s content than songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman were, so what’s up with that? Every account I’ve heard from the Sherman brothers goes something like this: “Walt handed us a book and said, ‘Write some songs and see what you can do with this.’” In other words, the songs were written before the screenplay was. The Sherman brothers generated all the major themes and plot points, with DaGradi (who drew storyboards) and Walsh (who wrote dialogue) merely riffing on their ideas. Although it sounds like it was a team effort, I nonetheless nominate the Sherman brothers as deputy auteurs.

But no, if anyone could be considered the true auteur of Mary Poppins, I think you know his name already.

*****

Say the name Walt Disney, and an image probably comes to mind (after the vomit has slid back down one’s throat). Square. Corny. Sanitized. Nostalgic. Cautious. Profit-driven. Mickey Mouse. Main Street, U.S.A. That song from Pinocchio might as well be called “When You Wish Upon a Soulless Conglomerate.” For some people, the word “Disney” alone makes it hard to take Mary Poppins seriously.

And yet sometimes, I think we’ve had the man all wrong.

For starters, there’s a modern-day corporation named Disney, and an animation pioneer and long-deceased human being named Walt Disney, and these are two entirely separate things. I fear we’ve conflated Disney the filmmaker with Disney the corporation – and lately the corporation hasn’t been doing the filmmaker any favors.

Disney the corporation conjures up not very part-time Buddhist phrases like “risk-averse,” “don’t upset anybody,” “polish the brand,” “bow to the almighty dollar,” “focus group every single idea of ours to death before proceeding.” Disney the corporation has spent years re-releasing its “classics” with titles like “35th Anniversary Edition.” Come on, that’s not even a real anniversary! Disney the corporation has swallowed up Hulu, ESPN, 20^th Century Fox, and presumably five other media properties in the time it took me to type this sentence. Some think of Disney the corporation as a form of evil; I mainly think of Disney the corporation as the epitome of safe.

But the young Walt Disney of the 1930s? That guy was anything but safe. Disney’s modern-day stockholders would have run him out of town on a rail. His buzzwords were “quality,” “innovation,” “excellence,” “perfection.” In fact, money was the annoying thing that got in the way. He was lousy at making money. He made his brother Roy deal with the money. Walt Disney was basically the Francis Ford Coppola of children’s filmmakers. Neal Gabler covers this well in his 2006 biography Walt Disney: the Triumph of the American Imagination. One example:

When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933 and declared a bank holiday that same week to help stem a possible run on financial institutions, Roy was shaken, frantic over how the studio would pay its staff with its assets frozen … Walt, who had no interest in politics and whose primary interest in money was in reinvesting it in his cartoons, was unsympathetic. “Quit worrying,” he shrugged. “People aren’t going to stop living just because the banks are closed. What the hell, we’ll use anything – make potatoes the medium of exchange – we’ll pay everybody in potatoes.”

Yeah. That’s what Walt Disney thought about money. More from Gabler: “‘If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s success,’ longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, ‘it’s that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of.’ ” Another typical quote from Walt: “I don’t want just another picture … It’s got to be a new experience, a new theatrical experience.”

I wouldn’t blame those who hear a satirical song like Mary Poppins’s “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank” with deep skepticism. Isn’t that rich – a Disney movie making fun of bankers. But here’s the thing: Walt HATED bankers. He used to walk around the studio openly calling bankers “a bunch of S.O.B.s” He was bored to tears by bankers. Here’s what every banker sounded like to him:

“You can purchase first and second trust deeds – think of the foreclosures! Bonds, chattels, dividends, shares …” “Bankruptcies!” “Debtor sales!” “Opportunities!” “Shipyards!” “The mercantile!” “Collieries!” “Tanneries!” “Corporations!” “Amalgamations!”

Screw that – he just wanted to feed the birds.

The notion of “safe” made the man puke. Did he make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 because it was “safe”? You know how many people in 1937 thought a feature length animated film was a good idea? Pretty much one person, and his name was Walt Disney. Everyone else thought, “Who wants to sit in a movie theater and watch an 80-minute cartoon?” Not one member of Disney’s current board of directors, transported back in time to 1935, would have greenlit the project.

And when Snow White became, up to that point, the highest grossing film ever made (and one of the few early Disney features to turn a profit), what did he do with all that money? Make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Part II? Build a castle in San Simeon? No, how about simultaneously launch into production on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi – all of which LOST money. But he loathed the thought of repeating himself. Concerning Pinocchio, Gabler writes, “It was imperative that it be bigger, grander, and more realistically animated. Otherwise there was no aesthetic reason to make it.” “No aesthetic reason to make it”? Since when did a movie studio give a shit about that?

And don’t get me started on Fantasia. Name me one “safe” thing about Fantasia. You think he hired a firm of marketing executives to see how Fantasia would test in a focus group? Fuck no. He thought it would be a cool movie to make, so he made it. He’d run around the Disney offices with conductor Leopold Stokowski and music critic Deems Taylor like a crazed madman, listening to pieces of classical music, brainstorming whatever bizarre imagery popped into his head. Fawns and centaurettes? Dancing mushrooms? Hippo ballerinas? It’s all animation – we can do whatever we want!

Listening to “The Nutcracker Suite,” Walt suggested that “ ‘a ballerina comes out – a graceful, beautiful girl – and she puts a little sex into the damn thing … When she whirls up, you see the panties and her little butt – it will be swell! The audience will rave if you can make them feel sex in a flower.’” Listening to The Rite of Spring, he envisioned, as Gabler describes it, “dinosaurs, flying lizards and prehistoric monsters … the history of the earth beginning with the creation and ending with man triumphing over his environment … a cosmic cataclysm that would test the bounds of animation.” You know, the usual.

Money? Money was the annoying gnat in the corner. Per Gabler: “When Roy asked during a discussion of possible scores why they couldn’t select some music that ‘just the ordinary guy like me can like,’ Walt flashed him an icy stare and ordered him out of the room, telling him, ‘Go back down and keep the books.’”

The man was a dreamer, a schemer, a rebel, a renegade. Looking at young Walt Disney, I don’t see a man obsessed with making and keeping his money. I see a man obsessed with making money so that he could blow it on his next hare-brained scheme.

Speaking of hare: how square are you if you make Alice in Wonderland? Ever wanted to see an animated feature that has no plot? Then boy, do I have the movie for you. (Upon pointing this out to a friend, he replied, “What do you mean? It has a plot. She’s trying to chase the rabbit.” I see.) The studio made a feature so loopy and unhinged that, once they finished it, they realized that they didn’t even understand their own movie, but … since they’d finished it, what the hell, might as well release it anyway. Imagine the Disney studio of today making Alice in Wonderland. Or the “Pink Elephants” scene in Dumbo. Why take drugs when you can just watch old Disney movies? At some point in this essay, I was going to suggest that Mary Poppins is a pretty weird Disney movie. Then I realized, wait, all the early Disney movies are pretty weird Disney movies.

Weird – and expensive. “Bow to the almighty dollar”? Walt Disney being bad with money was kind of his whole undoing. In the early days, the studio was Walt’s little Eden. Per Gabler: “ ‘You know, Joe,’ [Walt] said, with a sense of pride at the way things were going, ‘this whole place runs on a kind of Jesus Christ communism,’ doubtless without realizing that he was the Christ.” Gabler adds, “For a man who had long searched for escape into his art, the studio itself now had become an alternative world – a near-perfect world.” Yeah, but a perfect world that couldn’t stay afloat financially.

Walt’s grand vision to continually make the best of the best came at a grand cost, and by 1941, he couldn’t maintain the equilibrium between vision and cost (losing 40% of his market to the Axis Powers didn’t help either). Since the studio was in debt, he couldn’t pay his employees, so his employees went on strike, so he decided the commies were to blame for destroying his precious Eden, and he became a bitter, reactionary asshole. Once the U.S. joined the war shortly after the release of Dumbo, the studio only survived by basically becoming a propaganda arm of the federal government, Walt being sent on bizarre goodwill tours to South America and Mexico. For the rest of the decade, all he could afford to make were slapped-together anthology features like Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, and Make Mine Music. The good times were over. The studio became a shell of its former self. Gabler writes, “In effect the studio, which had once existed to make films, now made films so that it could continue to exist.”

Icarus had flown too close to the sun – but at least Icarus landed in Anaheim.

Yes, ironically it was an amusement park, not animated features, that stabilized the studio’s financial fortunes for good. And it was Disneyland that provided Walt with the thrill of creating something new and exciting again. But while the opening of Disneyland in 1955 might have been great for his pocketbook and sense of purpose, it wasn’t so great for his artistic image. Disneyland: where you can ignore the harsh realities of the world … while standing in line for five hours. Granted, I haven’t been since I was 16. Say what you want about the artistic merits of Disneyland, but the main problem I have with it is this: you have to physically travel there in order to experience it, whereas you can watch Dumbo or Bambi anywhere.

Here is where the word “Disney” started taking on its present-day negative connotations. Gabler writes:

Disneyland had become a metaphor for America – an America that had increasingly opted for fantasy and, its critics believed, was paying a price for doing so … Walt Disney, as the representative of all that was good and decent about that old, endangered America, had long been a bulwark against the sense of loss and threat. But in the roiling America of the 1960s … the nation’s favorite uncle turned into an anachronism: an emblem of conformity in a time of dissent.

My point is: circumstances forced him to become that anachronism. Given unlimited amounts of money, he would have kept making who knows what. The wild, untamed Walt of the ‘30s? Crushed and humbled, he meekly looked on as the studio with his name on it churned out Pollyanna, Davy Crockett, Johnny Tremain, The Mickey Mouse Club, and the occasional Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians, not because those animated features were breaking new ground, but because the public expected animated features from the studio that invented the animated feature. Gabler writes, “Nothing seemed to matter because Walt felt that everything now was hopelessly compromised.”

“We’re making corn, Peter,” he would tell matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. “I know it’s not your kind of corn, but it’s got to be good corn. Let’s make it the best we possibly can” … After watching To Kill a Mockingbird at a screening at his home, he lamented, “That’s the kind of film I wish I could make.” But he couldn’t. He was Walt Disney, and Walt Disney was now committed to making films that were innocuous to be enjoyed by the entire family.”

But that young rebel? That young renegade? The man who used to pall around with Sergei Eisenstein and Salvador Dali? He must have been in there somewhere. “During a photoshoot at his Disneyland apartment, Walt, according to the photographer, suddenly slouched in his chair, lifted a gin bottle, unzipped his pants fly, pulled out his shirttail, and said, ‘How’s this for the cover of a gossip magazine?’” But the photographer wouldn’t take the photo. He had to think of the children.

And yet. Maybe old Walt had at least a couple more tricks up his sleeve before the cigarettes did him in. And if he had any hope of breaking new ground in the early ‘60s, his studio was, ironically, better equipped to do it with a live-action picture than a cartoon. If only he could find the right project, one he could really sink his teeth into …

*****

There was just one problem.

If Walt Disney was Mary Poppins’s auteur, with the Sherman brothers serving as deputy auteurs, I advocate including a fourth name in the mix – whether she would’ve wanted to be included or not. I’m speaking of the contributions of one Helen Lydon Goff, better known as P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books.

Don’t tell me I’m the only one here who’s seen Saving Mr. Banks? What’s that? You haven’t seen it five times like I have? Weird. To make a long story short: you know the battle of wizards in The Sword and the Stone? Travers vs. Disney was like that, except if you’d swapped out wizards for micromanaging control freaks.

One lesson of the story might be, “If at first you don’t succeed, wait until the author of the book you want the rights to is running out of money.” As far back as 1938, Disney had been begging Travers for the rights (his daughters adored the stories), but she wouldn’t budge. And then one day, in the early ‘60s, she came to a moving realization: she was going broke. It’s a choice all of us must face at one time or another: to sell to Disney, or not to sell to Disney? That is the question.

Well, she sold to Disney … eventually. He thought he had a deal with her as early as 1946 for $10,000, until she demanded script approval. Someone other than Disney … have script approval? Ha! Fast-forward 15 years, and now she was asking for $750,000 – and script approval. From Gabler’s book: “… If she was strong-willed, she was also more than a little dotty. At the same time that she was disparaging Disney’s films, she had written her own Poppins treatment with a collaborator and submitted it to Walt, and she kept revising it, even though she refused to sign a contract with the studio. Walt attempted to appease her, inviting her to visit the studio so that, he said, she could get acquainted with his staff …”

I can see Walt now, cigarette in hand: “Look, lady, just sign the damn contract.” Maybe he figured she’d be a pushover. Maybe he figured she was going to be fun. Whoops! Here’s how the Sherman brothers describe it in the DVD documentary:

Richard: “And one day, about two-and-a-half years later, Walt said, ‘You know, we have to have the author come over here and listen to what you guys have come up with.”

Robert: “After we had written the whole thing.”

Richard: “Bob and I were totally unaware that Walt only had an option on the property. We, for two-and-a-half years labored, totally unaware of the fact that Mrs. Pamela Travers ultimately could say whether we could do this or not … And so by the time Mrs. Travers came over, we were very confident that she was going to be bowled over, but she wasn’t.”

Robert: “She didn’t like anything we wrote.”

Picture it now. The buzz of all those months of collaborative artistic energy, you’re writing the best songs of your lives, Walt bursts in with the occasional “Great work, boys!” or “The audience is gonna love it!,” you’re feeding off all that male, American camaraderie, and then in comes this fussy British spoilsport. Co-screenwriter DaGradi used to sit in the corner making sketches of Travers like this one:

From Wikipedia:

Travers was an adviser to the production, even being billed as the film’s Consultant. However, she disapproved of the dilution of the harsher aspects of Mary Poppins’ character, felt ambivalent about the music, and hated the use of animation so much that she ruled out any further adaptations of the later Mary Poppins novels. She objected to a number of elements that made it into the film. Rather than original songs, she wanted the soundtrack to feature known standards of the Edwardian period in which the story is set. However, due to contract stipulations citing that he had final cut privilege on the finished print, Disney overruled her.

Well done, Disney lawyers, well done. I hope someone got a raise for that one. Let’s get real here: there was no way in hell Walt was going to be handed an original score of that quality and not use it.

I don’t blame Travers for feeling protective or having concerns as to how her work was being adapted. If she was afraid that the Disney version would overshadow her own, well … she was right! How many remember that the title of Lewis Carroll’s book is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, not Alice in Wonderland?

But I do blame her for the inconsistency of her objections. Annoyed that the Shermans suggested changing the setting from the 1930s – the book essentially taking place in the time it was written in – to the Edwardian period? Fine. (As Richard Sherman explained, they thought it better to change it to closer to the turn of the century, “when you could believe a nanny could fly out of the air.”) Then why cave on that point and suggest Edwardian standards be used instead of original songs? Objected to the use of original songs instead of Edwardian standards? Fine. Then how come, according to Julie Andrews in the DVD commentary, when Walt considered cutting “Stay Awake,” Travers pushed for him to keep it in? How come one of the meeting tapes features the Sherman brothers playing “Feed the Birds” and Travers singing along? Hmm? The constant nitpicking, as Saving Mr. Banks picked up on, may have been a sign of other psychological forces at work. You know the best way to make sure Hollywood never tampers with your artistic vision? Don’t sell the film rights.

And all the while, Walt sat in his office, thinking to himself, “See, this is why I adapted stories by the Brothers Grimm, Carlo Collodi, and J.M. Barrie – because all those people are DEAD.”

In short, Travers seemed either unwilling or incapable of making decisions that took into consideration a … what’s the word … an audience? All her objections seemed to be rooted in a difficult-to-parse internal logic. For a producer whose favorite element of filmmaking was sitting around thinking up cool stuff an audience would dig, this was oil vs. water. He’d finally met his match. But in the end, there was never any doubt. Was she won over by the Disney magic, or by the fear of losing that cushy, cushy London lifestyle? As a film historian in the DVD documentary put it, “P. L. Travers said that talking to Walt was like talking to a friendly, charming uncle who took from his pocket a gold pocket watch and dangled it enticingly before your eyes.” But if she came to have regrets about her decision, I can tell you one person who’s glad she signed.

Me.

Me and the millions of people who love the film adaptation of Mary Poppins.

At least she’s in good company: for reasons unclear to me, the filmmakers, and the rest of the human race, Roald Dahl hated Mel Stuart’s 1971 film adaptation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Children’s authors. Go figure.

Besides, the notion that Travers “hated” the movie is a slightly specious one, given the conflicting comments she ended up making over the years. Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia: “In a 1977 interview on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, Travers remarked about the film, ‘I’ve seen it once or twice, and I’ve learned to live with it. It’s glamorous and it’s a good film on its own level, but I don’t think it is very like my books.’” All right. Fine. I can learn to live with that answer. Wikipedia also adds this: “Although Travers never fully accepted the way the Disney film version of Mary Poppins had portrayed her nanny figure, the film did make her rich.” Guess she could learn to live with that, too.

But her refusal to unequivocally endorse the film has left admirers of the Poppins books who dislike the film (and Disney as a cultural force in general) to be irritated to no end. Not being one of those people, and annoyed by Travers fans’ whining, I avoided reading the book for decades – perhaps afraid of finding myself agreeing with Travers fans and liking the movie less? It’s sort of like searching for an ex’s profile on social media – better to just leave some things alone.

Until one night, when I spotted it on the shelf of a friend’s house and, in the words of Doc Brown, I figured, “What the hell.” All right. Let’s see how wildly the movie deviated from the source material.

If you want to find Cherry Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the crossroads. He will push his helmet slightly to one side, scratch his head thoughtfully, and then he will point his huge white-gloved finger and say “First to your right, second to your left, sharp right again, and you’re there. Good morning.” … If you are looking for Number Seventeen – and it is more than likely that you will be, for this book is all about that particular house – you will very soon find it.

“Damn it,” I cursed under my breath as I read. “I actually have to like this book now.” My resentment melted away under her irresistible onslaught of English whimsy. It felt as if I were drinking a tonic made out of shavings of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, flakes of Village Green Preservation Society, ground Piper at the Gates of Dawn powder, and a drop of Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake syrup.

Also, the tone of the narration sounded a lot like the tone of the movie. Nevertheless, I made my way through the first few chapters, waiting to learn precisely how the film had monkeyed so egregiously with her vision:

They were glad Katie Nanna had gone, for they had never liked her. She was old and fat and smelt of barley-water. Anything, they thought, would be better than Katie Nanna – if not MUCH better.

Sounded familiar …

“Now, about references—” Mrs. Banks went on.

“Oh, I make it a rule never to give references,” said the other firmly. Mrs. Banks stared.

“But I thought it was usual,” she said. “I mean – I understood people always did it.

“A very old-fashioned idea, to MY mind,” Jane and Michael heard the stern voice say. “VERY old-fashioned. QUITE out of date, as you might say.”

Pity none of this made it into the film …

Certainly she followed Mrs. Banks upstairs, but not in the usual way. With her large bag in her hands she slid gracefully UP the banisters, and arrived at the landing at the same time as Mrs. Banks. Such a thing, Jane and Michael knew, had never been done before. Down, of course, for they had often done it themselves. But up – never!

My God. What did they do to her work?

But then I made it past Chapter Three, and I understood. See, the book has twelve chapters. The Sherman brothers took their main inspiration from the first three chapters, added a pinch of Chapter Seven (“The Bird Woman”), and then, while arguably maintaining the book’s tone, wildly deviated from its plot. The movie is about as faithful an adaptation of Travers’s book as Pink Floyd’s Animals is of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. They took inspiration from what they liked, flew off in brand new directions, and junked the rest. This is how Disney always worked. He’d sit around late at night with his animators, cooking up all the crazy places he could take a story. Faithfulness to the original text was never the altar he prayed on. In the original Pinocchio book, Jiminy Cricket gets stomped to death.

Also … the book has no plot. It’s a string of quirky vignettes. As Richard Sherman put it, “When we read the Mary Poppins books, we were so impressed with the characters and the stories, they were wonderful, but there was no storyline. It was a series of adventures. Mary Poppins flies in for no apparent reason, and flies away again at the end … And we wove them into kind of a story.” A faithful adaptation of the book would’ve played like the Disney version of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Or the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. I’m not sure what sort of movie Travers was expecting to be made. That’s my issue. None of her suggestions sound like they would have made the film any better. Maybe she was hoping for something along the lines of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which is a collection of three separate animated shorts (and which is perhaps the most charming Disney film of the ‘70s). But she objected to animation!

The other problem is that the book isn’t nearly as part-time Buddhist as the film is. It doesn’t reach into the same philosophical spaces that the film does. The book doesn’t take me on a journey. The characters don’t grow or evolve in a way that sticks with me. The book mentions Mr. Banks three times, and that’s it. Walt may have monkeyed around with her creation, but he brought a weight and substance to it that I don’t think was present in the original. The film version may not have been the story she wanted to tell, but it’s the story I find more emotionally resonant.

However, I bring all this up for a reason. Travers may have been a pain for Disney to work with, and she didn’t even provide her stamp of approval on the finished product, but I don’t see her contribution as being a minor one, or her involvement as being a mistake. I think her involvement made the movie better. WAY better.

The Sherman brothers, DaGradi, and Walsh may have had to scramble to satisfy her peculiar whims, but all that scrambling upped their game. To name one example, if Travers hadn’t freaked out about there being the slightest hint that Mary and Bert were romantically involved, the Shermans would have never come up with this exceptional verse from “Jolly Holiday”:

Oh, it’s a jolly holiday with you, Bert
Gentlemen like you are few
Though you’re just a diamond in the rough, Bert
Underneath your blood is blue
You never think of pressing your advantage
Forbearance is the hallmark of your creed
A lady need’nt fear when you are near
Your sweet gentility is crystal clear

“Forbearance is the hallmark of your creed”? Indubitably. As far as I’m concerned, Travers left her caustic, literate mark all over this sucker. According to Andrews and Van Dyke, even specific lines in the script, such as Mary’s “And what would happen to me, may I ask, if I loved all the children I said goodbye to?” and Bert’s cryptic last line, “Goodbye, Mary Poppins, don’t stay away too long” were added at her request. When was the last time a children’s film deployed terms like “extemporized,” “remuneration,” “self-amortizing,” or “noblesse oblige”? Without her, Walt might have been tempted to use a vat of sugar instead of a spoonful. She gave the movie its bite, its teeth, its particularity. She kept Mary Poppins weird.

Travers might have left her biggest mark through Julie Andrews’s performance, as the two of them corresponded throughout filming. And the more I’ve learned about Travers, the more I suspect Andrews partially played Mary Poppins as a P. L. Travers impression. Hmm, I wonder where Mary’s air of snappy, combative inscrutability came from?

So yes, she may have grumbled, she may have kvetched, she may have rued the day she learned that her lawyers were no match for Walt’s lawyers, and she may have hardly gotten anything she wanted, but I say thank you, Helen Goff. Thank you for your service.

In a DVD bonus feature containing footage of the film’s Hollywood premiere, there’s a moment where Travers is interviewed by a bland American radio host (presumably an hour before she flees the premiere in tears, mind you).

Host: “I would like you to tell the people out there how all of this came about.”

Travers: “Ah, now you’re asking for my secrets, and you know, one of the first things about Mary Poppins is that she never, ever explains.”

That host didn’t realize what he was up against.

*****

I’m sure there’s one element of the film Travers was absolutely thrilled with: Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent.

Look. Am I from London? Have I ever been to London? Do I look like some sort of regional English dialect expert to you?

During my brother’s third year in college, he studied abroad at the University of Nottingham, and he told me that, whenever he’d casually ask his fellow students if they’d seen Mary Poppins, their first comment was always, “Oh God, that ACCENT.”

You want to know something? Sounds fine to me. Dick Van Dyke could have been born and bred in Stepney as far as I’m concerned. (Allegedly, his dialect coach was Irish.) Let’s face it, the only reason most Americans are even aware that there’s such a thing as a cockney accent is because of Mary Poppins. Those Brits should be grateful. If I’d never heard anyone gripe about it, I wouldn’t have even noticed.

But you have to wonder: what did the rest of the actors think? Wasn’t 90% of the cast British? And the director? And why cast mostly British actors, but not all British actors? Has anyone else realized that Ed Wynn (who plays Uncle Albert) doesn’t bother with a British accent at all? No wonder why he loves to laugh – he’s laughing at all those suckers who haven’t noticed he isn’t wasting his time with a British accent!

*****

Like the best part-time Buddhist works of art (and unlike the worst cockney accents), the true depth of Mary Poppins has snuck up on me over the years.

I don’t remember how many viewings it took me before I realized that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” isn’t just some clever phrase Mary employs to trick the kids into tidying up the nursery against their will. It’s more like the film’s thesis statement. It suggests cultivating a more balanced way of approaching even the most mundane aspects of daily life. In the intro essay to my site, I made up my own four noble truths of part-time Buddhism, but honestly, I should just replace one of the crappier truths with “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Much better than whatever I had.

But Mary Poppins takes its own manifesto to heart. It revels in its own tiny details, cherishes the off-handed additions tucked into the margins. If this film’s credo is “Stop and appreciate the little things in life,” it serves as a living example of its own credo. Some of my favorite bits of sugar hidden within the medicine:

• Mrs. Banks, while singing “Sister Suffragette: “We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats/And dauntless crusaders for women’s … uh-votes.” “Uh-votes.” That kills me every time. It’s like the sound of her brain audibly steadying itself.
• Moments later: “Though we adore men individually …” This lyric has promise, but what could possibly rhyme with “individually”? “…We agree that as a group, they’re ra-ther-stu-pid.” Ah.
• Mrs. Banks, upon witnessing her husband conclude the composition of his “tough love nanny” advertisement: “Splendid, George, inspirational! The Times will be so pleased.” Oh will they?
• I love the one “tough love” nanny who, as she blows away, is stretched out flat like a pancake.

• Mary sticks her head out the window and sees a robin whistling. Charming. The robin swoops down and lands on Mary’s finger. Also charming. The robin starts whistling a countermelody to “A Spoonful of Sugar.” Levels of charming deemed unsafe by the FDA.
• Even her reflection in the mirror starts singing. Come on, people.
• Amid the maelstrom of self-folding blankets and renegade closets, a batch of block letters briefly lands in Jane’s arms and spells out “MARY POPPINS,” Mary giving it a brief, “Oh, I suppose that’s interesting” look before it tumbles into its proper container.

• The nursery furniture in the finale of “Spoonful” refuses to go quietly. “Were you quite finished?!” After two fate-tempting horn blasts on the soundtrack, Mary replies “Thank you.” But ah, the doors of the white cupboard emit one last, meager “bink bink.” NOW they’re finished.

And I haven’t even gotten to the chalk pavement picture sequence. Gonna need a whole separate section of bullet points for that one:

• “Don’t fall and smudge the drawing!” Even in an alternate reality, she’s so practical.

• The geese sing. The horse sings. The cow sings. Even the pig sings. There’s no way they can top this, right? Ah, but then comes the dance of the cane and the parasol. Burt’s cane and Mary’s parasol take flight and twirl in mid-air, the instrumental interlude of “Jolly Holiday” switches into waltz time and … it’s the coup de grace.
• Bert dips his fingers into a patch of animated flowers, and hands Mary an animated bouquet, which promptly turns into a swarm of animated butterflies. One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small?

• This shot. What is this shot? I ask the question in all seriousness. What are we even looking at? It’s an image of “real” actors somehow being reflected in “animated” water? I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count, and I still don’t know what I’m looking at.
• Bert rattles off the names of all the other women whose company he enjoys (“It’s true that Mavis and Sybil have ways that are winning and Prudence and Gwendolin set your heart spinning …”) as Mary seethes with resentment. Mary Poppins, you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you. Except this time, at least, you’re right: “But cream of the crop, tip of the top, it’s Mary Poppins and there we stop.”

• Bert dancing with animated penguins. Did the world ask for this? Did the world demand this? It’s one of those scenes that becomes its own reason for existing. It fails to advance the plot one millimeter further, and yet expresses a level of joy that I almost find disturbing. There’s something about the extended vamp at the end, as the instrumental backing slows to a clichéd vaudevillian crawl, Bert and the four penguins stepping back in unison in time with the four snare taps … the glee emanating from Van Dyke, Andrews, and the animators, basking in the pleasure of their own artistic audacity … out of the universe’s bottomless void, somehow this act of frivolous creation generates its own purpose and power. Basically, this is the point where Mary Poppins starts getting high off its own supply.

• And does this movie know how to do scene transitions? Following the lengthy penguin chaos, a solitary celeste plays on the soundtrack, Mary and Bert engage in the most genteel, rudimentary dancing possible, the penguins frolic around the platonic pair like fireflies, the rococo-flavored tableau dissolves into the image of a merry-go-round, and … on to the next adventure.

• On a similar note: the frantic and yet mathematically precise choreography in the last moments of “Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious,” Mary and Bert’s limbs mimicking each other, darting and shifting in one massive, unified blur while the cartoon band gyrates behind them, before all involved stop on a dime, thunder and lightning appear, and the mood instantly dissipates. Unlike with hard drugs, the comedowns in Mary Poppins are just as enjoyable as the highs.

I know Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland caught on with the stoner crowd, but might Mary Poppins be the Disney movie that comes closest to being … proto-hippie? Aren’t Mary and Bert basically encouraging Jane and Michael to tune in, turn on, and drop out? The movie has that classic children’s literature dichotomy between the dull, ordinary world the Banks children have heretofore been forced to live in, and the strange, enchanting world Mary’s arrival exposes them to – a world of mischievous fringe-dwellers inhabiting a subterranean society. Admiral Boom knows which crowd he’d rather hang with. Upon spotting the joyless, sexless nannies who have gathered outside the Banks home in response to Mr. Banks’s draconian advertisement, he bellows, “Ghaaaaaastly looking crew, I must say!”

But if Mary Poppins establishes its own secret universe, I still sense a tangible, internal logic within that universe. There are rules, even if us “normals” don’t know what those rules are. Although a carpetbag can be much larger than it appears to be, it is certainly not bottomless. Although a plume of chimney smoke can double as a staircase, it can do so only in a pinch, and only with the necessary prodding. Although medicine can change color and flavor in the spoon, it will not change to just any flavor, mind you. Although turtles can transport humans across a stream, they can do so only if those humans don’t weigh too much. And even a magical world like this one is far from perfect: children can still go missing, fathers can still lose their jobs, old men can still expire (even if they do so while giggling on the ceiling). My point is, a lot of crazy shit happens in Mary Poppins, but not just ANYTHING. The kids know how to roll with this – or at least Jane does.

Michael, upon seeing Mary Poppins swoop down from the heavens: “Perhaps it’s a witch.”

Jane: “Of course not, witches have brooms!”

Can’t argue with logic like that.

Even Mary, despite being able to reassemble a torn-up note from out of a fireplace, or slide up a staircase as well as down, isn’t in complete control of her universe, and often seems just as surprised by developments as everyone else is. But Zen master that she is, she knows how to go with the flow. Chalk pavement picture you’ve hopped into now melting in the rain? That’s OK – probably time to do something else anyway (as Bert puts it, “This here’s lovely ‘ot chestnut weather”). The two children you’re being paid to supervise get sucked through the chimney and onto the roof? Might as well soak in the sights and have a good time while you’re up there.

*****

Is it bad that this movie makes me want to be a chimney sweep?

If you came into Mary Poppins hoping that it would use its depiction of the polluted environs of early 20^th century London as an opportunity to dissect the social inequities suffered by unskilled labor, or to highlight the damage inflicted by the Industrial Revolution, you are going to be disappointed.

Such a movie, while being more “factual” and “historically accurate,” would also be way less fun.

Think about how magical Mary Poppins has to be in order to pull this off. Any movie could depict its characters having the time of their lives while prancing around inside a chalk pavement picture. But how many movies could depict its characters having the time of their lives while prancing around a carcinogenic hellscape? One person’s carcinogenic hellscape is another person’s hidden playground. To quote Madonna, “Beauty’s where you find it.”

This is what makes Mary Poppins so radical. All you political activists think you’re so radical. You want to talk about radical? The rooftop scene in Mary Poppins is radical, because it’s philosophically radical. It turns notions of both beauty and privilege on their heads. Think you know who’s having a good time in this world and who isn’t? You might be surprised. “Oh it’s awfully dark and gloomy up there,” Jane observes, she and Michael staring up into the pitch-black void. But Bert’s got news for her:

“There now, you see how wrong people can be? That there is what you might call a doorway to a place of enchantment:

Up where the smoke is all billowed and curled
‘Tween pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world
When there’s ‘ardly no day, nor ‘ardly no night
There’s things ‘alf in shadow, and ‘alfway in light
On the rooftops of London, coo, what a sight.

Oh yeah. I am in. I am so in.

Though I’m sure most working-class Londoners were getting a raw deal, the hard part-time Buddhist truth is: a person can be of any status and be happy. Why tie all your happiness to your external environment, your social standing, or your material conditions? If anything, money can be an obstacle to happiness as much as a conduit. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” a man almost as famous as Walt Disney once said. Or, as Bert puts it:

Now as the ladder of life has been strung
You might think a sweep’s on the bottommost rung
Though I spend me time in the ashes and smoke
In this ‘ole wide world there’s no ‘appier bloke

And the movie somehow makes this potentially toxic and grimy environment visually inviting. Can I ride a staircase of soot to the top of Big Ben, please?

Then comes the finest shot of all. I don’t know how they did it. On the one hand, part of my brain knows that I’m looking at four actors in a Burbank studio staring off into the opposite end of a movie set, followed by an insert of a matte painting that features a bunch of dinky little holes poked into the back of it, while some studio shmoe is moving a couple of lights around behind the painting.

On the other hand, as Bert’s words mingle with a brief instrumental reprise of “Feed the Birds,” I’m watching my favorite shot in Mary Poppins. Because, where some might stare out at the London cityscape at dusk and say, “Eh, nothing special,” Bert stares out and says this:

“What did I tell you? There’s the whole world at your feet. And who gets to see it but the birds, the stars, and the chimney sweeps?”

Think about it. Mr. Banks is sitting there at work, stuck in his middle-class cage – one of the thousands of blinking lights down below – presumably thinking of Bert and his ilk as a bunch of lowly bums covered in grease. And yet, Bert has access to a privilege which even the wealthiest of Londoners do not. Who is the one truly missing out in this scenario? Do men like Mr. Banks know Bert’s world exists? If they were treated to the same view as Bert’s, would they even see the beauty in it?

*****

So. About Mr. Banks.

Mary Poppins has a lot of tricks up its sleeve: turning a flat piece of painted glass into an awe-inspiring sunset vista, making integrated human/penguin tap dancing seem not only likely, but inevitable, launching an array of frumpy nannies airborne across Cherry Tree Lane. But the sneakiest trick that Mary Poppins plays … is that it’s not really about Mary Poppins at all.

You’d think a movie called Mary Poppins would be about the character named Mary Poppins. But you would be wrong.

Ah, it’s about Jane and Michael then.

Wrong.

Bert and his secret society of dancing chimney sweeps?

Wrong.

The maid? The cook? The perennially beleaguered constable?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In fact, Mary Poppins is quite coy about its most important character. Only as it nears its conclusion does his story finally take primacy. Don’t let all the whistling hummingbirds and weapon-deploying admirals fool you. The most important character in Mary Poppins … is Mr. Banks.

It’s a twist. Even scarier: a DISNEY MOVIE twist. Unhappy children wish for magical nanny. Magical nanny shows up, not to rescue the unhappy children – although, what the hell, she does a little of that – but to rescue the unhappy father.

Which is all the more remarkable, given that, for the vast majority of the movie’s running time, that father doesn’t realize how unhappy he is. When Mr. Banks makes his first appearance, twelve minutes in, he appears to be in perfectly good spirits. “How are things in the world of finance?,” Admiral Boom shouts.

“Never better! Money’s sound, credit rates are moving up, up, up, and the British pound is the admiration of the world.”

Yes, all is right with the world. Aside from the little matter of your children being missing and possibly dead, but never mind. Without even giving his wife an opening through which she could puncture the balloon, he bursts into “The Life I Lead,” a song extolling, with comic idealism, the lack of a single blemish on his existence:

I run my home precisely on schedule
At 6:01, I march through my door
My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02
Consistent is the life I lead

It’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910
King Edward’s on the throne, it’s the Age of Men
I’m the lord of my castle, the sovereign, the liege
I treat my subjects, servants, children, wife, with a firm but gentle hand, Noblesse oblige

It’s 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion
Are scrubbed and tubbed, and adequately fed
And so I’ll pat them on the head and send them off to bed
Ah, lordly is the life I lead

A masterful, eloquent treatise, but there’s just one problem: it’s a lie. It’s a steaming bucket of horse dung (real horse dung, not animated). Illusion, thy name is Mr. Banks. Part-time Buddhist parental tip of the day: If you’re going to boast, in verse, about your children being “scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed,” at least check to make sure they’re home first. (Also: little does he realize that Edward VII is only a month or two away from joining Queen Victoria. Age of Men, indeed.)

I think the big illusion Mr. Banks is under is that order equals happiness – a tempting worldview, granted, but not one that is shared by part-time Buddhists like me and my female nanny counterpart. What do you have without “tradition, discipline, and rules”? “Disorder, catastrophe, anarchy – in short you have a ghastly mess!” A mess, or just the reality of being human? To quote Yellow Submarine, “It’s all in the mind, you know.”

The problem is, if your idea of happiness is centered around control, stability, and predictability, you are going to become unhappy very quickly, because the messiness of life inevitably intrudes. Enter Mary Poppins. Mr. Banks is about to find some things out the hard way.

Barely twenty-four hours since the start of her employment, and everyone in the house is already intoxicated by the new nanny’s ebullient spirit. Everyone … except Mr. Banks. “Ellen, stop making that offensive noise! And shut the window! That bird’s giving me a headache.”

Mrs. Banks offers a generously diplomatic diagnosis: “I’m so sorry you’re not feeling well this morning, George.”

“Who said I’m not feeling well? I’m fit as a fiddle. I just don’t understand why everyone’s so confoundedly cheerful!”

Moments later, when Michael explains that “Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious” is “something to say when you don’t know what to say,” his father replies, without batting an eyelash, “Yes well I always know what to say.” Oh, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we? “Winifred, will you be good enough to explain this unseemly hullabaloo?”

“I don’t think there’s anything to explain, do you? It’s obvious that you’re out of sorts this morning, the children just came in to make you feel better.”

“I should like to make one thing quite clear, once and for all; I am not out of sorts. I am in a perfectly equable mood, I do not require being made to feel better!”

Right.

“I have no objection to anyone being cheerful or pleasant. But I do expect a certain decorum. And I can tell you one thing, Winifred. I don’t propose standing idly by and letting that woman Mary Poppins undermine the discipline … [CRASH BANG BOOM] … There’s something odd – I may say extremely odd – about the behavior of this household since that woman arrived. And I want you to know that I’ve noticed it!”

He’s like a man with children who hates childhood. They’re a smart financial investment, and that’s it. You want to know something? Mr. Banks reminds me of somebody.

Not Walt Disney’s father Elias, although, reading the early pages of Neal Gabler’s biography, I was momentarily tempted:

The frugality, the discipline, the taciturnity, and the reproachfulness had always been constituents of Elias Disney’s personality. The man who eschewed recreations, who never drank or swore and always said grace at the table, even though he now attended church infrequently, prided himself on his stern morality, put the fear of God into his children, and never let anyone doubt that he was the head of the family, the one whom the Disneys had to obey. Walt found him so unapproachable and obdurate that, he said, he scarcely talked to him.

Geez. Couldn’t have been too tough for Walt to identify with Jane and Michael, I guess. Saving Mr. Banks attempts to draw parallels between Mr. Banks and P. L. Travers’s unstable, alcoholic father, and although I found the glimpse into her hardscrabble Australian childhood fascinating and the scenes well-filmed, I’m not sure how successful the movie drew those parallels.

Nor could it have been too tough for Walt to imagine himself as Mary Poppins herself: the all-powerful being who, through instinct, creativity, and manipulation, descends upon the American public, spreading joy to all the girls and boys and rescuing them from their crummy childhoods.

But no, out of all the characters in the film, the one who reminds me the most of Walt is Mr. Banks. Not that Walt was a terrible father to his two daughters; surprisingly, according to Gabler, he was a kind, fair, affectionate, and attentive parent.

No, it’s that he was a terrible boss. In the early days of the studio, he could alternate between being inspiring and being terrible, but by the late ‘50s, he was mostly just sticking with terrible. Select quotes from Gabler’s bio:

The staff lived in fear. Total abject fear … “You know,” he said to [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea director Richard Fleischer], “Every once in a while I just fire everybody, then I hire them back in a couple of weeks. That way they don’t get too complacent. It keeps them on their toes.”

Even Bianca Majolie, who had known Walt since high school, would vomit after she made a presentation to him. Everyone in the studio was terrorized by the swift distinctive clack of his heels on the hard gray tile floor and his hacking smoker’s cough as he approached a room, animators would jump into their seats when he entered.

One executive said that he could “suddenly shift course without notifying the appropriate able-bodied seamen, then lash them to the mast when they pursued the original plan as charted.”

Poppins screenwriter Bill Walsh: “He never let you sit down without pouring a little turpentine on your rear end … You were being patted on the head by this kindly old uncle who wanted you to be happy and have a nice warm lunch when you suddenly realized you were talking to Attila the Hun.”

“Uncle Walt,” eh? He was also, like Mr. Banks, a workaholic. Reflecting on the early days of the studio, Walt observed, “I was expecting more from my artists than they were giving me, and all I did all day long was pound, pound, pound.” Describing the final push to complete Snow White, Gabler writes, “He was still fiddling, still agonizing, still reviewing the script with his staff scene by scene for three or more hours at a time several times a week and on weekends too – scenes that he had already been laboring over and picking at for years.” His wife Lillian recalled, “No matter what plans I made for the weekend, we would always end up at the studio. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.”

I wonder if the man who needed to be taught a lesson or two from Mary Poppins … was Walt Disney.

On Day 2 of her employment, after the children unwisely let slip that they’ve spent their afternoon having a tea party on the ceiling, Mr. Banks has heard enough. And yet, when the moment comes for him to slam the hammer down, Mary unleashes her Jedi mind tricks. Tempted to come right out and fire her, he loses steam when he senses a sympathetic audience for his parental philosophy that “the children must be molded, shaped and taught/That life’s a looming battle to be faced and fought,” allowing Mary to not only agree but take his views to an ironic extreme:

They must feel the thrill of totting up a balanced book
A thousand ciphers neatly in a row
When gazing at a graph that shows the profit’s up
Their little cup of joy should overflow

It’s time they learned to walk in your footsteps
To tread your straight and narrow path with pride
Tomorrow just as you suggest, pressed and dressed
Jane and Michael will be at your side

Yes! Excellent! Precisely! Wait, what?

It’s Mary Poppins’s world, Mr. Banks, and you’re just living in it.

“And why not?,” he mutters to his wife, attempting to recover from the fog of manipulation, throwing in a dig at the opposite gender’s supposed predilection for irrational sentimentality: “A capital idea! Just the medicine they need for all this slipshod, sugary female thinking they get around here all day long. Quite right, good idea, quite right, good idea.”

Hmm. Reminds me of a certain producer I know. From Gabler: “… Walt once told an animator who asked for a raise after the man’s wife had said they needed more money, ‘You listen to your wife, huh? I’d hate to tell you where I’d be if I had listened to my wife.’”

And a lovely thing she is, too. One feels the Travers presence asserting itself during scenes like these. Question that I’ll let someone else explore more thoroughly than me: is Mary Poppins kind of a feminist movie? Isn’t its universe more or less a matriarchy? Forget the milquetoast activism of Mrs. Banks; isn’t a woman already in charge here?

Moving on. Confused that A) their nanny is still employed (“Sacked? Certainly not, I am never sacked”) and B) their father has agreed to take them on an outing, Jane shouts, “Oh Michael, the city! And we’ll see all the sights, and father can point them out to us!”

“Well, most things he can,” Mary replies. “Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can’t see past the end of his nose … Sometimes a little thing can be quite important.”

She’s tricky, this one. Although the children (and the first-time viewer) hardly suspect it, Mary is setting another piece of her plan into motion, by singing a song so seductive in its fairy-tale majesty that it infects the minds of the children with a monomaniacal desire to give a couple of coins to a creepy old hag covered in bird poop. But the children are merely her instrument – her real target is Mr. Banks.

Personally, having spent many years working in downtown San Francisco, I don’t blame Mr. Banks one bit, or anyone else in London, for habitually ignoring some smelly street lady during their morning commute. But after Mary Poppins sings “Feed the Birds,” I mean … handing my money to that woman would fill me with more ecstasy than shooting up the purest, most crystalline bag of heroin into my veins. The combination of live footage of actress Jane Darwell squatting on some dinky studio set, the sprinkling of animated pigeons fluttering about the matte painting of St. Paul’s, and the almost gothic choir moaning wordlessly on the soundtrack slowly dissolving into Mary’s practically perfect visage … I’m sorry. There is no way I am not giving my tuppence to that bird woman.

The next morning, after spotting her on their way to the bank, Jane shouts, “You do see her, don’t you, father?”

“Well of course, I can see her. Do you think I can’t see past the end of my nose?”

Don’t answer that, children.

Once in the bank, Mr. Dawes, Sr. provides as succinct a counterargument to Michael’s stated intentions as any: “Feed the birds and what have you got? Fat birds!”

(Note: on the DVD commentary track, Karen Dotrice, who played Jane, remembers her discomfort with the actor playing Mr. Dawes, Sr.: “I didn’t think he’d live to do the scene! He was so old and decrepit. I thought he was going to pass out on us. And he was not only hideously ugly and scary, he seemed smelly and frail and all those things that children do not want to be around … I thought, ‘We’d better get this scene right, ‘cause this guy’s not going to be around tomorrow’.” Only later did she learn that the actor was Dick Van Dyke in make-up.)

But the bankers’ tune, persuasive as it is (“You see Michael? You’ll be part of … railways through Africa! Dams across the Nile! Fleets of ocean greyhounds! Majestic self-amortizing canals! Plantations of ripening tea …”), proves no match for the fentanyl-laced meth that is “Feed the Birds,” and when Mr. Dawes, Sr. yanks the tuppence from Michael’s fingers at last, Matthew Garber lets out the most convincing “GIVE IT BACK!” I’ve ever heard a child actor deliver.

While appearing chaotic to the mortals involved, what comes next unfolds just as our scheming nanny has intended: Michael’s tantrum leads to a run on the bank, which leads to Mr. Banks being in big, big trouble. Which is silly, when you think about it. As if the run on the bank was somehow his fault? If your employers are going to be that punitive, you’re better off working for someone else. But tell that to Mr. Banks, who’s spent his whole life thinking of his job as the pillar of his identity. You try losing your identity and see how it feels. The man’s having a meltdown. If this is all part of Mary Poppins’s plan … kind of a fucked up plan, no?

Twenty minutes and one take-no-prisoners rooftop sequence later, Mr. Banks comes home, after a less-than-stellar workday, to discover that … chimney sweeps have invaded his house. Talk about literal dirty dancing. Circumstances have spun so far out of his control that he can hardly muster up the will to get angry. If anything, the more he tries to reassert control, the worse things get, his outcry of “What’s all this?” swiftly rendered meaningless by Burt’s pals chanting it back to him Fight Club style. By this point, his authority within his own dominion has been so thoroughly punctured that, as a chain of departing chimney sweeps shake his hand (including a soot-faced Michael), all he can do is stand there dumbfounded. Please close your mouth, Mr. Banks, we are not a codfish.

This leads to another of my favorite shots. The force of the chimney sweeps’ anarchy is so all-pervasive that, as they scurry down Cherry Tree Lane and off into the mists from whence they came, Stevenson holds the shot, and holds it, and holds it, as if even the director isn’t entirely sure that they’re truly gone. He needs to hold that shot just long enough, after the last limb of the last chimney sweep disappears into the ether, almost to the point where it becomes uncomfortable, for the finality of it all to seep in.

Mouth agape, still failing to grapple with his crumbling existence, Mr. Banks listens as his daughter exclaims, with poorly chosen timing, “Every single one of those chimney sweeps shook your hand – you’re going to be the luckiest person in the world!”

The irony: she’ll soon be proven right. In just a few hours’ time, Mr. Banks is going to realize just how lucky he is. But standing amid the wreckage with soot on his hands, well … turning to his unflappable hire, he makes one last, vain attempt to regain authority.

“What is the meaning of this outrage?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Will you be good enough to explain all this?”

“First of all, I would like to make one thing quite clear.”

“Yes?”

“I never explain anything.”

Then this wasn’t really a “first of all” scenario, was it? Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of Travers in all its glory.

Well, it’s all fun and games until Dad has a breakdown. A dejected Mr. Banks sits in his study, Bert lurking nearby, and launches into song, but this version of “The Life I Lead” isn’t quite as peppy as the earlier ones:

A man has dreams of walking with giants
To carve his niche in the edifice of time
Before the mortar of his zeal has a chance to congeal
The cup is dashed from his lips, the flame is snuffed a-borning
He’s brought to wrack and ruin in his prime

Damn. Bet you forgot that Mary Poppins swerves into It’s a Wonderful Life territory, didn’t you? But Bert doesn’t sound like he’s about to call a suicide hotline: “Life is a rum go, guv’nor and that’s the truth.”

“You know what I think? It’s that woman Mary Poppins. From the moment she stepped into this house, things began to happen to me!”

My world was calm, well-ordered, exemplary
Then came this person with chaos in her wake
And now my life’s ambitions go with one fell blow
It’s quite a bitter pill to take.

Ah, but that “calm, well-ordered, exemplary” world of his was resting on a rickety foundation. In other words, if Mary Poppins hadn’t come along and shattered his world, something else would have.

“I know the very person you mean. Mary Poppins. She’s the one what sings … ‘A spoonful of sugar, that is all it takes, it changes bread and water into tea and cakes.’” Notice Bert singing “A Spoonful of Sugar” with a mutant melody. He’s up to something funny here …

“You see that’s exactly what I mean! Changing bread and water into tea and cakes, indeed! No wonder everything’s higgledy-piggledy here.”

“A spoonful of sugar goes a long, long way. ‘ave yourself an ‘ealthy ‘elpin’ every day …”

“Do you know what she did? I realize it now. She tricked me into taking Jane and Michael to the bank. That’s how all the trouble started.”

“Tricked you into taking the children on an outing? Outrageous! A man with all the important things you have to do. Shameful!”

You’re a man of high position, esteemed by your peers
And when your little tykes are cryin’, you haven’t time to dry their tears
And see them grateful little faces smilin’ up at you
Because their dad, he always knows just what to do

“Well I mean, look, I don’t think I …”

Think it’s rough losing your job, Mr. Banks? What about the children who’ve lost their father?

“Like you say, guv’nor:

You’ve got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone
Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve
And then one day they’ve up and grown
And then they’ve flown
And it’s too late for you to give

And so it’s here, as this tangled medley realizes where it was meant to land all along, when Bert returns to the melody of “Spoonful” proper, and the once innocuous phrase takes on a grander meaning:

Just a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down
The medicine go doww-wown …

Bert keeps up the bluff to the end, uttering his last line with a tone of “Let’s pretend I didn’t just deliver the most important speech in the movie, shall we?”: “Well, goodbye, guv’nor, sorry to have troubled you.” Don’t mind me, folks, nothing to see here.

At Mary’s instruction, Jane and Michael finally give their father the tuppence. “Will that make everything all right?”

No, you idiots, you got your dad fired. But Mr. Banks, with a newly sensitive look in his eye, replies, “Thank you.” Upstairs, Mary nods. No, it won’t make everything all right, but that doesn’t mean the children aren’t doing the right thing.

And then, the walk.

It may not be the first scene people think of when they think of Mary Poppins, or even the tenth, but Mr. Banks’s late-night walk through the deserted streets of London may be the one scene that sticks with me the most. No dialogue – just three or four atmospheric, well-composed shots and a wordless reprise of “Feed the Birds” – and yet somehow I feel like I’m witnessing the transformation of Mr. Banks’s inner being right before my very eyes. (Maybe it’s the choir. Seriously, don’t undersell that Disney choir.) He’s a grown man slowly realizing that a child remains within him. Scratch that: he’s realizing that a truly grown man learns not to excise his inner child, but to retain him – or rather, to balance both child and man.

He glances at the steps of St. Paul’s, but the bird woman is gone. (Duh, she’s probably at a homeless shelter, if she had any brains – that night looks like it’s freezing.) The irony: he can finally “see” the bird woman, even though she’s physically absent. “It’s too late for you to give.” Is it, Mr. Banks? Is it?

As Mr. Dawes, Sr. and his executive council commence with the ritual shaming (before turning Mr. Banks’s umbrella inside out, one of them gasps, “No, not that!”), Banks appears be in an oddly good humor. When Mr. Dawes, Jr. relates the story of the only previous run on the bank, Mr. Banks gladly finishes it: “As the ship lay in Boston Harbor, a party of the colonists, dressed as Red Indians, boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and threw all the tea overboard. This made the tea unsuitable for drinking … even for Americans.” When Mr. Dawes, Sr. proclaims that this second and most devastating run was “caused by the disgraceful conduct of your son,” and adds, “Do you deny it?” Mr. Banks, at last having grown a pair, replies, “I do not deny it, sir. And I shall only be too glad to assume responsibility for my son.” Two hour set-up, meet moment of payoff:

“Well, do you have anything to say, Banks?”

“Well, sir, they do say that when there’s nothing to say, all you can say …”

“Confound it, Banks! I said, do you have anything to say?”

“Just one word, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”

By Jove, I think he’s got it.

“What? What are you talking about, man, there’s no such word.”

“Oh yes, it is a word, a perfectly good word. Actually, do you know what there’s no such thing as? It turns out, with due respect, when all is said and done, that there’s no such thing as you!”

Gone mad? No. At long last, George Banks has embraced the ghastly mess.

So wait, Mary Poppins is advocating that you become some dead-beat, kite-flying dad and abdicate all adult responsibilities? No, I think it’s advocating for balance. Mr. Banks, despite the best of intentions, had lost that balance. Providing financial support for your family is an important thing, but it’s not the only thing. There’s also whimsy, playfulness, and yes, a little madness. (A well-timed bit of madness might even get you your job at the bank back.) Every once in a while, jumping into a chalk pavement picture is important too. But let me tell you something: if you spent all your time jumping into chalk pavement pictures, then you’d have problems. Mary Poppins is all about the middle path.

When I first poked my nose into Buddhist philosophy, I assumed that in order to achieve “enlightenment,” I needed to throw away my computer, go live in the woods, ignore my sex drive, and subsist on rice and berries. But I don’t think that’s it at all. Enlightenment, as I see it now, is just living your life, but tweaking it a bit. You can still do all the things you enjoy doing, but do them with the benefit of a kinder, wiser perspective. It’s about the little changes. A spoonful of enlightenment, if you will, to help the medicine go down.

Or maybe it’s about appreciating life to its fullest. Like most of us, Mr. Banks was spending his days inside his little box, oblivious to all the wonders around him, not able to see past the end of his nose. Not even able to see his own children.

I certainly didn’t know why, when rediscovering the movie upon turning 17, it hit me with the force of religious revelation, but I can understand it better now. Like Mr. Banks, I had been spending my days inside my own little box, attempting to orderly plan my way out of my unhappy existence. And since my plans involved controlling people and events beyond my control, my plans failed, and I resented living in a universe that had allowed my plans to fail. Only when I cracked, as Mr. Banks did, could I embrace the ghastly mess at last, and experience a joy untethered from plans and order. In his new incarnation, he flew a kite; in my new incarnation, I just watched Mary Poppins.

Or maybe it’s about appreciating your life while you can. Two years after the release of Mary Poppins, Walt Disney would be dead. If only he’d gone out laughing like Mr. Dawes, Sr., instead of going out coughing. If only his body had been cryogenically frozen instead of cremated (apologies for spoiling one of the great urban legends). Perhaps he sensed that the end was near. Perhaps he felt regret over his decades of prickly, ungrateful behavior, and saw this as his opportunity to atone. Perhaps he understood that this would be his great final statement, one that was bound to carry a bit more weight than That Darned Cat or The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin. After all, who knows what moment might be your last? Gabler describes a frequent ritual of Walt’s during those last two years:

On Fridays, at the end of the workweek, he would occasionally invite the Sherman brothers to his office and discourse about the future. Then inevitably he would wander to the window, stare into space, as he so often did now, and ask them to “play it!” – a command so familiar to the Shermans that they knew he meant “Feed the Birds” … Whether Walt related to the song because he related to the woman’s loneliness, or whether in a life of grand gestures he appreciated her small one, or whether he recognized in her his own mortality, or whether the woman simply reminded him of his mother, he never said, and no one would ever know. But hearing the song, he would always cry.

I know. A silly little kid’s film. But though its words are simple and few … Listen. Listen. It’s calling to you.