2001-02-05 - 23:59:46

First Favorite Movie

I'm doing two movie entries in a row! Oh, well. It's my playpen, after all.

Last night I happened to catch a movie on TV, and it was one of my first favorite movies, and I still love it dearly. It was the first movie I every saw twice in a theater, and it may well be the first movie I ever saw in a theater, period.

Why didn't I include it on my list of favorite movies in my analyzer? I guess I was afraid of looking silly. Then again, why should someone who named himself "Uberhamster" care about looking silly?

The movie is Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. I've seen it at three different times in my life, and its had a different effect on me each time.

I first saw it when I was a little boy, during its first theatrical release in the mid-1960s. Looking it up in my movie guide I see that the date on the film is 1964. Was I really only five years old when I saw it the first time?

I remember my mother taking me to the grand old theater in downtown Frown Town. This was back in the day when Frown Town actually had a downtown; it was full of thriving shops and department stores and always seemed to be thronged with pedestrians. Now, it's pretty much of a ghost town, except that the theater is still there in all its glory, recently restored.

Back in those days, before videotape, it wasn't uncommon for movies to have second or third runs and I'm fairly sure my mother took me to see Mary Poppins again a year or so later.

I wish I could remember exactly what I thought about the movie as a kid, but I do remember liking it very much, and enjoying the songs, too.

The plot of the movie is pretty simple. In London, circa 1910, the two children in the Banks household are not looking forward to their new nanny, because all their previous ones have been so crabbed and mean. In answer to their prayers Mary Poppins is blown into their lives, quite literally. It's clear from the start that she is no ordinary nanny - for starters when she opens up her umbrella she can fly!

Using her curious magic powers Mary Poppins takes the children on all sorts of adventures, with he help of a Cockney jack-of-all-trades named Burt, played by Van Dyke. This magic infects the entire Banks household, including the oblivious mother and workaholic father.

The last time that Mary Poppins was in theaters was near the end of the 1970s. I think it might have been in the Summer of 1977. For a lark I took a date to it when it was showing at one of the smaller local theaters, back before they were eaten by all the multiplexes at the shopping malls. Again, this was before the days of videotape and I hadn't seen the movie for over a decade.

This seems like a silly thing to say, but I found the subtext of the movie almost shocking. The magic and make-believe of Mary Poppins seemed so much more appealing than the gray, unfriendly world of the rest of the adults in the film. The father, in particular, seemed particularly repressed and unhappy. The message of the movie seemed to be: don't grow up because it sucks! The hippies are right!

I think the shock was mainly one of recognition for me. There were things that I though I'd always felt, and I saw them articulated in the movie. I wondered if I'd gotten them from the movie.

The father in the movie was a banker, my father was a stock broker. Both of them seem to be consumed by their joyless jobs.

As a child, I didn't really get the lure of business and the stock market. I remember constantly finding business magazines around the house. The businessmen featured on the covers didn't look very happy: red-faced old men squeezed into their business suits like sausages. The world of business that my father dealt with seemed almost inhuman, and the ridiculousness of it seemed to be epitomized in Mary Poppins by the president of the bank trying to wrestle two pennies away from a little boy. It wasn't so much that banking and finance were simply not fun, the movie implied that they were soul-crushing and as far as I could tell, it was right.

So what did I think about the movie now, over 35 years after the first time I saw it?

The first thing that impressed me was how good the music was. There are lots of stand-out songs: "Chim Chim Chiree," "A Spoonful of Sugar," "Step In Time," "Feed The Birds", "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious" - I think the movie won an Academy Award for the music.

I also paid more attention to the relationships between the children and the parents. Both the parents were too preoccupied to pay any attention to the kids - they were viewed as an irritation and it was the nanny's job to take care of them anyway. Kind of reminded me of the way I was raised - except of course there was no nanny.

At one point in the movie when it was obvious the children needed some attention, and the parents just foisted them off on Mary Poppins. When I pointed his out to Lily, she commented that the children looked as if they'd rather be with Mary Poppins anyway. Well, who wouldn't?

But all that aside, I just enjoyed the movie. It is a lot of fun, but also very sweet and sentimental. I let it tug on my heartstrings, and it felt good. I was entertained.

Perhaps looking for deep messages in light entertainment like this is not such a good idea. For example, I notice that in spite of all the jibes at the finance industry, Mr. Banks got his miserable job back at the end of the movie, and he was glad to get it back, too.