Passport to Pimlico (1949)

 "Blimey! I'm a foreigner!"

It's ridiculous that I hadn't seen this iconic Ealing comedy until last night but, well, now I have. And it's brilliant, obviously. But it wasn't quite what I expected. And I'm not just talking about the scene with a pig in a parachute..

This is very visibly and very deliberately set in a post-war London of rationing and bomb sites. An unexploded bomb looms large. There are constant references to the privations the characters all went through a few years earlier. In the late 1940s, this is what it means to be British... and yet, the characters are all fun, quick-witted, likeable and enjoying life regardless. This is not the privately educated England of the stiff upper lip, but the real England of beer and belly laughs.

...Until it isn't. The central conceit is that, suddenly, this little street on Pimlicois in fact, legally, a random surviving remnant of the Duchy of Burgundy, with a descendant of Charles the Bold as its sovereign. The film plays, for laughs of course, all the difficulties ofva community finding itself as a microstate, with no pre-existing law, government, police, armed forces or foreign relations. Indeed, the film gets surprisingly abstract and philosophical as it humorously examines the very concept of nationhood. It's a nice touch that the microstate enjoys a massive heatwave while it's Burgundyy but, as soon as it's British again, the heavens open...

The cast is superb. Stanley Holloway is perfect, a strikingly young Charles Hawtrey has a memorable role, but for me it's Margaret Rutherford's eccentric professor who stealds the show. This is a fine little comedy but also quietly intelligent in its themes, and a fascinating little time capsule.

Batman: The Great Train Robbery

"You cheated! You know we ain't no good in a fair fight!"

Just to recap, before I discuss this splendid episode... I've seen the first season as a young adult, some parts more than once, albeit more than twenty years ago. But, although I've seen many, but by no means all, of the second and third season, we're looking at childhood memories, so watching certain episodes can lead to a completely unexpected wave of nostalgia. That's what happened tonight where Chief Standing Pat, the episode's totally non-problematic Native American character, spoke of a time "when little hand is on eleven, and big hand is on twelve." I remember this line from having seen it once, as a child of about ten, in about 1987. That's weird.

Stanley Ralph Ross has a knack for superb scripts, and this is his best. Shame (and the institution f the two parter) get the best of send-offs here, in a rare second episode that far exceeds the first. Not even the dodgy accent of Hermione Baddesley as (snigger) Frontier Fanny can take away from it.

We have a splendid deconstruction of Western tropes here, with a train robbery and ending with a shootout at High Noon and "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do". All the characters know full well what genre they're in. The wit of this script is a joy. And Cliff Robertson is superb; Shane hasn't really appeaed that much but there's a reason why the character is so fondly remembered. And, while the third season may (we can now see) perhaps be the least good overall, it can still hit real heights.

Batman: The Great Escape

"They've got Batgirl, and we've got Fanny."

There are two things which are probably worh mentioning as I start to blog this episode. The first is that, in this final run of episodes with their many last times, this two parter is both the final appearance of Shame and, well, the last two parter.The other thing, no less importantly, is that Hermione Baddesley- the maid from Mary Poppins- is playing a character called (titter) Frontier Fanny.

This is a hilarious episode for many reasons, not least Shame's sidekicks: a Native American who communicates solely in shorthand smoke signals and a Mexican bandit with a cut glass RP accent, neither of which you would see today, but this kind of playfulness with stereotypes is not, I don't think, mean-spirited.

There's more, though, from the latest variation on the ever entertaining "Commissioner rings the Batphone with Bruce Wayne present" trope to Batman reading the note from Shame in Shame's own vernacular, reminding us that Adam West is a terrific comic actor. I've peraps been remiss, too, in my praise for the penmanship of Stanley Ralph Ross.

Still no cliffhanger, though, and this was the last chance...

Mary Poppins (1964)

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”

 

Yes, I really am doing this. All these horrors and I go and blog Mary Poppins. What can I say? It amuses me. I won’t pretend this sort of thing is usually my cup of tea, but I actually rather enjoyed it. In fact, I’m full of regrets about waiting until the age of almost thirty-six to see it. This is the perfect film for children, with everything about it firing the imagination of the child within us all. It’s forever deriving fantasy from the mundane and ordinary. A simple bag becomes a magical repository of all things. You can jump into pictures and become a cartoon. Plus there are songs and that. Julie Andrews is captivating as our heroine, and her voice is extraordinary.

The one thing everyone knows about this film is that Dick Van Dyke’s “cockney” accent is said to be awful by all. In fact, it is far more jaw-droppingly atrocious than I would have had the power to imagine. I would be very much surprised if this were not the worst accent in the history of cinema. Having said all that, I worry that I may have underestimated just how bad it is! It’s a pity. Van Dyke is actually pretty good when it comes to the actual acting, giving us a likeable and charismatic Bert, but you’re far too busy laughing at the accent to take any notice of what he’s doing.

This is very much a tourist friendly version of London and, for that matter, a version of 1910 which has been sanitised for the children of the 1960’s. Knowing that this is a Disney film I was looking for reactionary sentiments throughout, which was an interesting exercise. One of our first songs appears to mock the Suffragette movement, and the character of Bert portrays the hard life of Edwardian poverty as not only bearable but positively fun. This may appear to show conservative attitudes to both gender and class issues, but, these are interestingly subverted at the end, where Mr Banks’ patriarchal authority is undermined by both of these things.

The whole look of the film is a bit of a jolt after so many more modern films in a row. The tanned faces, the technicolour picture quality and the matte painting backgrounds give the film a retro charm that contemporary audiences would have never seen.

Mary Poppins herself is a force of nature. Yes, we see this in her interaction with the children, but the best moments for the character are those in which she wraps Mr Banks right round her finger. She is, essentially, the perfect Edwardian woman- unflappable, infinitely capable, sexless, and maintaining the very stiffest of upper lips in the silliest and most surreal of circumstances. This, of course, is what makes her so damned charismatic.

Some of the social attitudes are fascinating. It’s only 1964, but the film shows a strangely modern hostility to fox hunting. I never knew, though, that apparently foxes can be Irish! I raised an eyebrow, given the bastardry of banks in recent years, at their negative portrayal in this film. A run on a bank is a rather more alarming thing to see nowadays than it would have been at the time.

This film is quite, quite mad. We have an Admiral who keeps his house like a ship and shoots at chimney sweeps. We have a carousel where one can ride the horses away. We have animated fireworks that look like something out of Yellow Submarine. We even have an Englishman who pronounces “niche” as “nitch”. Grrrrr! The ending is simultaneously reinforcing of the patriarchal family structure and subversive of it, a nice touch. Mary Poppins buggers off as the wind changes: this apparently orderly and conservative figure is, underneath, capricious and chaotic, and brings whimsy to all she touches. I never thought I’d say this, but I love this film.