Appendix 1: Synopses of films
who lives with his mother, and Blair is the girl he meets at a
dance where she has been abandoned by her blind date.
Mary Poppins
Robert Stevenson, Walt Disney, US 1964.
Julie Andrews ; Dick Van Dyke; Glynis Johns; David Tomlinson;
Hermione Baddeley; Elsa Lanchester; Jane Darwell.
Musical about a magical nanny (Andrews) and her subversive,
though ultimately therapeutic, interventions into a middle class
Edwardian household. Animation, live action and studio versions
of stereotypical London exteriors are combined in a series of
storybook versions of conventional Britishness as imagined by
Hollywood.
Mildred Pierce
Michael Curtiz, Warner, US 1945.
Joan Crawford; Eve Arden; Ann Blyth; Jack Carson; Zachary Scott.
The generic codes of film noir and the family melodrama are
employed to tell the story of Mildred Pierce (Crawford), the
break-up of her marriage, her rise and fall as an entrepreneur,
and the fate of her two daughters.
Millions Like Us
Launder and Gilliat, Gainsborough, UK 1943.
Patricia Roc; Gordon Jackson; Moore Marriott; Eric Portman; Anne
Crawford; Basil Radford; Naunton Wayne; Joy Shelton; Megs
Jenkins.
The film deals with female call up in the UK during the second
world war, and follows a group of young 'mobile' women as they
are drafted to a munitions factory in the countryside far from
their homes. They come from a cross section of classes and
regions and the understanding that develops between them is
exemplary of the Ministry of Information's ideal of a
patriotically united home front.
Mr Skeffinqton
Vincent Sherman, Warner, US 1944.
Bette Davis; Claude Rains.
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