Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear

Every obituary I have seen for Glynis Johns has led with Mary Poppins (1964), but I saw her first as one-third of the most famous of cinema tongue-twisters, doing her best along with Mildred Natwick to instruct Danny Kaye in the correct disposition of the pellet with the poison: "It's so easy, I can say it!" – "Well, then you fight him!" As a small child memorizing the routine on the scratchy autumn-colored fold-out couch of my grandparents' TV room, I absorbed without fully appreciating the comic yet valid genderbending of their relationship which is despite the best efforts of Angela Lansbury the central romance of The Court Jester (1956), taking for granted that Kaye's Hawkins could be assigned the nursemaid duties of caring for the rightful infant heir of their never-never olde England while Johns' Maid Jean served as the second-in-command of their band of greenwood outlaws, the Black Fox's Captain. Acutely aware of his standing as the only man in sight who doesn't buckle a swash, he mostly keeps his crush to himself except when it stumbles out in nicely queer statements like "Each time I see you as a woman, sir—" once she's assumed female drag for their mission, but nothing he does as he flails the rest of the movie through various burlesques of masculinity as either an elegant false assassin or the cardboard knightly lover he's fingersnapped into will make her love him any more than watching him gently lullaby the heir to sleep; emboldened to confide his doubts that "the Captain could ever be fond of a man who isn't a fighter," he hears to his encouragement that "tenderness and kindness can also make a man." She herself was brought up as a warrior, a passionate defender of freedom as expert in arms as her father: "I think he really wanted me to be a boy." – "Too bad," Hawkins sighs as they break their first, decidedly mutual kiss. "You'd have made a wonderful girl." It's clear all through the third-act fight scenes that if it weren't 1956, she'd have seized a blade and taken on Basil Rathbone herself, although she does at least get to clout any number of evil knights and catapult them into the sea. I formed the instant, enduring, and totally extra-canonical conviction that with the heir finally restored to his throne, Hawkins would handle the childcare aspects of a regency and Maid Jean would obviously serve as his tiny, formidable chief knight. I did eventually see Mary Poppins—probably at the same summer camp at the Arlington Boys & Girls Club where I received most of my exposure to Disney movies—but Johns in my memory would always look more like Maid Jean than Mrs. Banks, an impression not really dispelled by her perkily butch Wren in Perfect Strangers (1945) or her matter-of-factly non-human mermaid in Miranda (1948). She had the character actor's gift for turning up in far more movies than I marked at the time, so that while I'm thinking about South Riding (1938) or 49th Parallel (1941) I've forgotten No Highway in the Sky (1951) or The Card (1952). I would have seen her most recently in The Sundowners (1960), deftly forestalling the end of an affair with Peter Ustinov by affectionately, unsentimentally dumping him first. I would have heard her almost as early in A Little Night Music (1973), because "Send in the Clowns" was always playing somewhere on Standing Room Only. I am glad she got to make her century. I will watch something from it for her.