Mary Poppins, Film and Book

All day long Mary Poppins had been in a hurry, and when she was in a hurry she was always cross.
--P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins (Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

Travers book is creepy, e.g, an old woman breaks off two of her fingers and gives them to the babies to suck on; neither the woman nor the babies appear in Disney's film.  Disney was something of a pioneer in animation, mainly by hiring brilliant animators like Ub Iwerks and taking credit for everything they did. Disney could make the grimmest fairy tales bland and his live-action films were mostly tedious. Mary Poppins, the film (1964) I put in the same category as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind (both from 1939):  corporate, meretricious products with some charm but little artistic quality.  The only thing I liked about Disney's movie was Julie Andrews singing songs by the Sherman Brothers, but she didn't sing nearly often enough and, as Mary Poppins, she was absent from the film for long periods, replaced by Markc Breaux's dull choreography and some unfunny routines about the English banking system. It's hard to see what, if any, role director of record Robert Stevenson (by that point a Disney house director) had in the Mary Poppins film, which I am sure was the way Disney wanted it.