Podhoretz Does Disney

Is it always a bad idea to read the Weekly Standard? Well, if you’re unlucky, you may stumble across William Kristol, calling for more world wars, or at least bemoaning the fact that World War I gave mass slaughter a bad name.

On the other hand, you may come across John Podhoretz taking a poke at Walt Disney:

The year is 1961. A wonderful and kind and nice and glorious man named Walt Disney must convince a mean and nasty and crazy woman named P. L. Travers to allow him and his movie studio to do something really nice for his children and your children and everyone’s children. Our hero—call him Walt, everybody does, except P. L. Travers, because she’s mean and nasty and insists on “Mr. Disney”—wants to make a movie out of Travers’s book Mary Poppins, because he promised his kids he would, and a man never backs out on his promise to his kids. P. L. Travers is crazy because she doesn’t want him to do it and tries to sabotage the project by insisting he shouldn’t do it the way he knows it should be done. Unfortunately for all that is wonderful and nice and good, the crazy mean woman owns the rights because she happens to be the creator of Mary Poppins.

Ouch, huh? Not only does Big John make fun of Walt Disney, he makes fun of the Walt Disney Corporation:

So what’s the point of all this? The point is corporate. The true story of Saving Mr. Banks is this: The Walt Disney Company engaged an indifferent director and two pedestrian screenwriters to create a hagiography of itself—one that elevates its founder to sainthood and defames a strong-willed writer who was guilty only of working to defend her beloved creation against bowdlerization and trivialization.

Saving Mr. Banks, of course, is the new Disney film about the creation of the Disney film Mary Poppins. One can gather that Mr. Podhoretz read the Mary Poppins books as a boy and loved them, and winced at the thought of sweet Disney syrup being poured all over Travers’ distinctly insular, angular creation.

But miracles can happen, says Big John, even in Hollywood, which is not the Weekly Standard’s favorite location. Even though Travers was “right,” and Disney “wrong,” “Mary Poppins must now be acknowledged as one of the four or five best movie musicals, with a dazzling score and some of the best dance sequences ever filmed. The Travers stories are more mysterious and more powerful, and the cutesy mood of the movie violates their spirit, but it still casts a deep enchantment.”

“One of the four or five best movie musicals, with a dazzling score and some of the best dance sequences ever filmed”? What planet is John living on? Planet Weekly Standard, I guess. I never read the Mary Poppins books—I assumed they were for girls—but I did see the movie in “real time” and didn’t care for it at all. Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent sounded like a speech impediment, and the rest of the show wasn’t much better. “Chim Chim Cheree”? Hey, it was no “Bibbity Bobbity Boo”. And “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious*”? Don’t get me started. Don’t even get me started.

Afterwords
Much of the commentary on Saving Mr. Banks has been tougher than John’s, accusing Disney of being a red-baiter and a racist. Well, he certainly was a red-baiter, but years ago I wrote a review for the Bright Lights Film Journal of Maurice Raph’s memoir, Back Lot: Growing Up with the Movies. Raph was a prominent leftist who worked for Disney. I summed up Rapf’s portrait of Disney as follows:

Rapf paints an affectionate picture of Walt Disney as a laid-back, modest perfectionist. When Rapf told him that he was one of the three biggest names in Hollywood (along with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin), Walt said “No. Mickey Mouse maybe. Not Disney.” The two liked to argue politics, and Disney attributed his life-long Republicanism to an incident in his youth, claiming that a gang of young Democrats out on a spree had pulled down his pants and coated his balls with hot tar. (Apparently, conservatives can’t take a joke.)

I’ve also written reviews for Bright Lights of all of Fred Astaire’s musicals, almost all of which are much better than Mary Poppins. Scroll down past the Charlie Chaplin reviews to get to them.

*Word can spell this. Interesting.

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