For many years, this was the last movie the Sherman Brothers worked on for Disney. It seems Disney cut two of the musical numbers in order to make the film short enough to appear as the Christmas movie at Radio City Music Hall; movies that play there at Christmas are shorter, to leave room for a stage show. This is appropriate given that their most famous work for Disney is arguably Mary Poppins, and this movie is based on the books Walt bought to adapt if he couldn’t sway Pamela Travers into letting him buy Mary.
August 1940. Bombs are falling in England. Children are being evacuated from London, specifically for the purposes of our story to the tiny seaside village of Pepperinge Eye. The postmistress (Tessie O’Shea) is in charge of finding places for all the children. The last three remaining are a trio of London street ruffian orphans. Charlie (Ian Weighill), Carrie (Cindy O’Callaghan), and Paul (Roy Snart) Rawlins only have each other, but they most fiercely have each other. And they are given over into the care of local spinster Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury), who doesn’t like children.
And also is working in secret that she fears the children will violate. She is studying to be a witch from Professor Emilius Browne’s correspondence school of witchcraft. The children arrive the same day as her first broom. They make a deal that they will not reveal her secret, and in exchange, she presents Paul with the fabulous Traveling Spell. However, when Miss Price receives news that the college is being shut down before she receives the last spell—the spell of Subsitutionary Locomotion—she asks Paul to take her to see Professor Browne in order to acquire the spell. Professor Browne is not what she expects, and she is not what he expects.
The Academy, in its persistent way, did not nominate the best song from this movie for Best Original Song. We’ll talk about the nomination and the actual winner in a minute, but we’re starting with the actual best song, because it’s “Portobello Road.” It is, in my opinion, some of the finest work the Shermans ever did. Honestly, I think it captures what’s best of “Chim Chim Cheree” and what’s best in “Feed the Birds” and one or two others, and the whole sequence also captures more of the multiethnic flair of war-era London than just about any other movie scene you could name.
I mean, it wasn’t until this viewing that I worked out that, yes, those are prostitutes attempting to pick up Professor Browne and not just friendly women. Which is . . . not something I expected from a Disney movie. But if you look at what they’re wearing and exactly how they size him up, it seems to me that, yup, they’re wondering if he’s got a few bob in his pocket to spare for a little bit of fun.
But leave that aside. Indisputable is that this is one war film that acknowledges that not all the soldiers of the British Army were actually Englishmen. It’s not just the bit of a jig or the hint of Irish step-dancing. It’s the Indian soldiers. The steel drum segment, meaning we’re also including the West Indies. This is what wartime London would have meant. Just months after Dunkirk, London was packed with soldiers from around the Empire, and here some of them are.
The actual nominee, “The Age of Not Believing,” is the sort of sweet lullaby that it’s hard to dislike but hard to really truly like, making it a surprise nominee to me in a movie that also includes “The Beautiful Briny” and even “Substitutionary Locomotion.” All in all, it’s a strong score that lost the Best Adaptation and Song Score category to Fiddler on the Roof, the first win for John Williams.
A hint more surprising is that the Best Original Song category was that year won by Isaac Hayes for “Theme From Shaft.” Because while that Eglantine Price is one good witch, she’s not exactly one bad mother. Like, I love this movie, and I would have been happier if “Portobello Road” had been nominated. But even if it had, I would’ve accepted if it hadn’t won and had lost to “Theme From Shaft.” Because seriously!
Director Robert Stevenson came to the US because of World War II. Star Angela Lansbury and supporting actor Roddy MacDowall (as the grasping parson who would totally enlist were it not for his quinsy) were essentially evacuated, where he spent the war making movies. David Tomlinson was actually a flight lieutenant in the RAF, admittedly as a flight instructor in Canada, and Robert Sherman helped liberate Dachau. And a couple of people playing German soldiers had lived in Nazi Germany, so there’s that?
Okay, so no one’s going to mistake this one for Mary Poppins, no matter how tangled they are in one another’s production history. (“Beautiful Briny” was actually written for a rejected Mary Poppins sequence!) And the restoration of that cut material is frankly so-so at best; few of the performers could dub their own lines, for whatever reason, and the people replacing them are seldom great—Postmistress Hobday’s accent shifts around, and Professor Browne doesn’t sound like himself much at all. Still, I don’t think my love of it is exclusively due to its steady rotation on the Lost Disney Channel of My Childhood. I think most of it holds up. That’s pretty good for a children’s movie.
