Send In Glynis Johns (A Heartfelt Send-Off)

The headlines announcing the death of actress Glynis Johns at the ripe old age of 100 tended to focus on her 1964 appearance as Mrs. Banks (both a mom and a daffy suffragette) in Disney’s mega-musical, Mary Poppins. Sevcral newspapers, notably the New York Times, spotlighted her as a Tony-winner for her 1973 role in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, in which she introduced the poignant “Send in the Clowns.” But her stage and screen successes started early. Coming from a long line of performers on both sides of the family, she made her British stage debut at age 12. In 1936, she played the trouble-making schoolgirl at the heart of Lillian Hellman’s bold-for-its-time The Children’s Hour. Her move into movies came in 1938: film brought her roles that were both dramatic and comedic. By 1949 she was starring in a British fantasy called Miranda that today sounds uncannily like the Tom Hanks-Daryl Hannah 1984 romance, Splash. Playing a mermaid who comes ashore to see London, she was highly praised by New York critic Bosley Crowther, who gushed, “Glynis Johns is bewitching — one half of her is, at least — as the coyly flirtatious finny creature.”

 She made her Hollywood screen debut circa 1950, again being cast in a wide variety of roles. Though comedy was her forte, she was Oscar-nominated as a talkative innkeeper in a major 1960 drama set in the Australian Outback, The Sundowners. My own first screen encounter with Johns came when I was a small girl delighting in Danny Kaye’s funniest movie, The Court Jester (1955). This is a mock-medieval romance in which Kaye’s meek character is persuaded to masquerade as the king’s jester in order to overthrow a usurper to England’s royal throne. The film is enlivened by hilarious wordplay I can still recite (“The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle,” and so on). There’s also some wacky jousting and an unforgettable sword-fight in which Kaye’s character, dueling the great Basil Rathbone in his final onscreen bout, swerves madly back and forth between timid and bold,

 In the Court Jester there are two important female characters. Angela Lansbury plays Gwendolyn, an imperious English princess with eyes for the jester. Johns is Maid Jean, one of the rebels dedicated to removing the usurper from the throne. As a small girl, I was confused. Jean seemed both bold and smart, admirable qualities, to be sure. And she had a wonderful throaty speaking voice I instinctively liked. Yet Gwendolyn was a princess, and (more than that) a tall blonde. So familiar was I with the social norms of the era that I figured she’d be the one who’d end up with the guy. Happily, though, it turns out to be the short(er) brunette who gets her man. Here, for a change, was a case in which blondes don’t have more fun.

 Some twenty years later, Johns IS a blonde, and she too is apparently unlucky in love. (In real life, she was married and divorced four times.) On-stage, in A Little Night Music, she originated the role of Desiree Armfeldt, a celebrated stage actress whose multiple romantic affairs never pave the way for a permanent union with the one man she wants. In compensation, she gets perhaps the most memorable song in the Sondheim canon, a rueful acknowledgment of where her life has led. It was written in a limited range to accommodate Johns’ modest vocal powers while giving her a chance to convey strong emotion. Though many famous singers have recorded it, Sondheim insisted that Johns’ original version was his very favorite.

 

Looking at Mary Poppins Through a Glass Magically

In an era keen on updating classic movies—or at least concocting sequels—I admit I have not yet watched the new Mary Poppins Returns, in which Emily Blunt cavorts with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yes, I’m curious to see how these two super-amiable performers handle their respective roles. Nonetheless my heart still belongs to Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, despite the latter’s atrocious mangling of Cockney English.

Last night I took a turn down Memory Lane when I re-watched the original Mary Poppins, the 1964 Disney musical that introduced film audiences to Broadway’s Julie Andrews and the always-useful word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” I’m dating myself in admitting that this film debuted (at L.A.’s palatial and now long-gone Carthay Circle Theatre) during my senior year in high school. Of course in one sense my friends and I were far too old for a juvenile entertainment about two small kids and their nanny. But I suspect that’s part of why we kept going back to see it. On the brink of leaving our families behind as we went off to college and the big world beyond, we felt suddenly sentimental about the cheery days of our childhoods. We’d all encountered P.L. Travers’ series of Mary Poppins books years before, back when we first learned to read. Though Andrews was, frankly, too pretty and too perky (what’s all this “spoonful of sugar” business?) to be Travers’ acerbic nanny, we loved her just the same,  And it was only natural for us to think of our own early days as magic times.

Re-watching Mary Poppins in the company of a seven-year-old boy and a little girl who’s almost five, I delighted in it all over again. The kids loved the jokes (“A wooden leg named Smith!”), as well as such flabbergasting moments as the characters popping into chalk pictures and having tea parties on the ceiling.  As for me, I was reminded of the movie’s technical cleverness. In an era long before the advent of CGI, amazing things happen. There’s also a fabulous chimney-sweep dance number that rivals the barn-raising sequence in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for male Terpsichore, as well as some droll sight gags and the wonderful work of a slew of character actors. The cast includes such British treasures as  Arthur Treacher, Reginald Owen, Arthur Malet, and the hilariously furious Elsa Lanchester (the Bride of Frankenstein herself!) as a departing nanny. In the larger roles of the children’s parents, it’s a pleasure to see David Tomlinson as a strait-laced papa and Glynis Johns as a lovingly addled mama. And some Old Hollywood royalty appears too: that’s Ed Wynn as the buoyant Uncle Albert (he who floats aloft because he can’t stop laughing) and Jane Darwell (an Oscar-winner as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath) selling bird-seed on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Of course, there are some awkward Disney ironies too. We might well question Disney’s trivializing of the British suffragette movement, as reflected in Glynis Johns’ dizzy performance.

And it’s distinctly odd that the dramatic climax of the film comes when little Michael can’t be talked into investing his pocket-money tuppence in his father’s bank because he’d rather spend it to feed hungry pigeons. We’re meant to be squarely on Michael’s side, but since when is Disney (the new owner of Fox Studios and pretty much half of Hollywood) opposed to red-blooded financial investment? 

But finally, who cares? It’s lovely to enjoy a jolly ‘oliday with Mary Poppins. And the message that childhood is fleeting is something of which we could all use a reminder.