Bedknobs and Broomsticks

2022 - 10 - 12

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Image courtesy of "/FILM"

Bedknobs And Broomsticks Let Angela Lansbury Give One Of The ... (/FILM)

The 1971 Robert Stevenson film "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" often gets unfairly maligned as a lesser "Mary Poppins," but that's a huge disservice to the ...

The one thing that "Mary Poppins" has on "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" is the songs, because unfortunately most of the songs in the latter are totally forgettable. There are images from "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" that have been burned deep into the recesses of my brain since I was a child, and among them is Miss Price finally receiving her new broom and trying to figure out how to fly on it. There are some moments in "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" that have aged strangely, namely in a segment where the bed-riding crew visits the magical land of Naboombu, where animals rule, but for the most part, it's a joyous celebration of imagination as a way to escape tyranny and sadness. The kids join her on a magical flying bed that can travel through time and dimensions in order to find the fabled final spell and hopefully fight back to save their home. She doesn't know what to do with children and the kids don't really like her all that much, but once she reveals that she's learning how to be a witch via a correspondence school, they become fascinated. The late Academy Award-nominated actor had not yet become a household name with the 1980s television series "Murder, She Wrote," but film and Broadway fans were sure to recognize her playing a wacky witch who goes on a magical animated journey with a family of children and a con artist/purported school of witchcraft professor named Mr.

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Image courtesy of "Londonist"

Bedknobs And Broomsticks - Mary Poppins With A Spoonful Of ... (Londonist)

In 2014, Angela Lansbury made an entrance on an iron bedstead in a marketplace in East London, and was given a standing ovation by hundreds of adoring fans.

But I did watch the film for the first time in years during lockdown, and can confirm that most of its magic is still potent — with Lansbury's performance a doozy. There's a lovely scene in which Browne shows Price and the kids to 'his' London mansion house, which he is quite patently 'borrowing', perhaps owing to an unexploded bomb (still smoking) in the front garden. One of Lansbury's final performances was as a balloon seller in a London park for the kite-flying climax of 2018's Mary Poppins sequel. And for Bedknobs' veritable conveyor belt of trippy scenarios, the setting of London has some of the most enchanting scenes. At Chrisp Street Market, though, she introduced the 1971 Disney musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, in which she stars as Eglantine Price, a trainee witch who begrudgingly takes in three London evacuees during the second world war. Her dad was also mayor of Poplar, and it's said his death from stomach cancer when she was a young girl led to her creating characters as a coping mechanism.

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