Mary Poppins is just plain crazy. It’s based on a book filled with various adventures that don’t always connect, and consequently the film often lacks coherency. Some scenes in the movie have absolutely no place in the story, and are merely a pretty spectacle – certainly “Step in Time” seems this way, and no such song would be written for any musical produced after Disney’s The Little Mermaid. One of the characters (the mother) was given a mission that goes nowhere as far as the story is concerned, just because the writers wanted to give her something to do; in the book she just wasn’t around much, with no explanation. Some of the actors could not sing properly, while others were completely inept at presenting believable British accents. Yet, somehow, Mary Poppins is one of the far greatest films of all time. It is not only a classic, but a top-tier classic, and it could never be replicated.
Interestingly, they tried to replicate it. The story of Bedknobs and Broomsticks revolves around a magical woman who ends up caring for a few bored British kids (who are clearly designed to give the film the same tone as Poppins) and David Tomlinson (Poppins’ Mr. Banks) takes a main role. The film features big, Broadway-like musical numbers that add little or nothing to the plot, and the characters randomly spend part of their time in a cartoon world. The film is very much aware of the historical context of its story and has fun with it, and it also has fun with the special effects that were possible at the time, with some scenes that remind me very much of Spoonful of Sugar. In short, this is a very careful forgery of the kind of feeling that Mary Poppins had, and while it’s not perfect, it’s still a decent forgery – to the point that it has become a classic in its own right.
I use the word charm quite a bit in my reviews, but I can find no better word for the special quality of Mary Poppins that this film recaptures other than charm (or perhaps Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious). It’s the little things that make it work so well – the way it’s easy to see how the effects are done, or the way the children frequently interrupt Angela Lansbury’s singing with their little remarks. Some of the visuals are fantastic (literally), and I especially love the way it looks when they travel with the bed. The one thing Bedknobs improves upon in comparison to Poppins is its use of David Tomlinson as a showman, because now I feel like his talent was almost wasted for most of Poppins, but apart from that, this film does feel like it’s lacking something. I think perhaps I would have liked it better if I had watched it growing up, and having only seen it as a young adult, it doesn’t quite “wow” me as much as I would hope – in fact I found much of the plot rather tedious due its lack of . . . well, plot. It does indeed have a story, but the story is loose (and randomly involves fighting Nazis at the end) because the film is more interested in the emotional effect of its individual scenes than it is the intrigue of its story. That being said, I can’t imagine The Gnome-Mobile is any better, so I’ll take what I can get.
