Apparently filmmaker
and studio owner Walt Disney spent 20 years trying to get the film rights to
enable him to make a story that his own children particularly liked about a
‘mystical and magical English nanny’ and a chimney sweep with the worse cockney
accent your ever be unfortunate enough to hear! The story Mary Poppins was authored in 1934 by the Australian born novelist
Helen Lyndon Goff who wrote under the pen name of P L Travers.
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| Helen Lyndon Goff. |
If John Lee
Hancock’s film Saving Mr Banks (2013) is anything to go by I would not mind
betting that Walt wished he’d he never bothered. Mrs Travers, as she insisted on
being called, was a bad tempered, rude, self obsessed spinster who brought to
mind the lyric about ‘cobwebs’ from the Marianne Faithfull track ‘Why’d Yd Do It’
from Broken English. We first meet this woman as an obnoxious misguided
child who lived in a remote part of the Australian outback with her suicide
prone mother, her drunken father, who hinged on the edge of insanity and a
younger sister. The film jumps back and
forth between her rather unfortunate childhood and her visit to the Disney capitalist
filmmaking utopia in New York.!
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| Mary Poppins, Walt Disney and Mrs Travers! |
The extremely glossy
production, were both the Mary Poppins story and the author’s repugnant outlook
on life are explained away by her upbringing, stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney
and Emma Thompson as P L Travers. Not exactly riveting, but it turned out to be
an acceptable experience but one that was tadge over long and it will certainly
not linger in your subconscious. Evidently it won an award for the ‘Best Movie
for Grownups Who Refuse to Grow Up’ that say’s it all really!
