I do remember seeing "Mary Poppins" in late 1964, when I was
going to college full time (GWU) while “living at home”, and had taken up the
Friday afternoon chess club at GWU, which at the time was adding something back
into my life. This was the year when
nobody could beat LBJ (not even Goldwater) and Vietnam was starting to
simmer.
I think I saw if at either the old Buckingham Theater (now a
post office) or the Arlington (now a Cinema and drafthouse). The Walt Disney musical, directed by Robert
Stevenson, has a plot a little like ‘The Sound of Music”, with no politics, so
it seems smaller and stagier. Julie
Andrews plays the nanny applying to take care of the Banks kids in late
Victorian London, who can get everyone riding broomsticks. The movie has long stretches (in the middle
section) of typical Disney animation. So
it’s offered in just 1.66:1 standard aspect ratio, not needing the grandiose
look of bigger musicals. The music for
the many songs (many of which were deleted and have never been officially
released legally) is by Irwin Kostal (imdb) and is curiously uncredited
(strange for a musical, in a world where licensing and copyright of music means
everything, at least today). But the
film’s innocence, appropriate for the troubled days after the Kennedy
assassination, helped it many win Oscars, including Best Picture. I’m not sure whether any other Disney picture
had won Best Picture up to then.
Oddly. one of my favorite songs is "Feed the Birds".
The film was shown on ABC networks Saturday night December
10.
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