And a most wonderful, cheering movie it is, with Julie Andrews, the original Eliza of My Fair Lady, playing the title role and with its splices and seams fairly splitting with Poppins marvels turned out by the Walt Disney studio.

Julie Andrews’ first appearance on the screen is a signal triumph and she performs as easily as she sings, displaying a fresh type of beauty nicely adaptable to the color cameras. Van Dyke, as the happy-go-lucky jack-of-all-trades, scores heavily, the part permitting him to showcase his wide range of talents.

Mary Poppins is a near-masterpiece. It’s the best of the first wave of Disney live-action features, and the most complete and satisfying musical of any kind that the studio produced until Beauty And The Beast came along.

Van Dyke's energy is prodigious (especially when he leaps around with a gang of sooty chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops) and the songs are classics.

Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.