In the same year as Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews gave a very different performance in a wartime drama about courage, fear and love.
The Americanization of Emily was released in 1964, directed by Arthur Hiller and based on a novel by William Bradford Huie. It was set in London in the weeks before the D-Day landings of June 1944. James Garner played Lieutenant Commander Charles Madison, an American naval officer whose job was to arrange comforts for senior officers. Julie Andrews played Emily Barham, a British widow working as a driver for the military, who has already lost her husband, brother and father to war.
Madison argues, with cheerful cynicism, that it is better to be a coward and alive than a hero and dead. Emily, who has lived with loss, challenges that view, and their argument becomes the moral centre of the film. Andrews played Emily as direct and unsentimental, a woman who has learned to be practical because grief has left her little choice. The performance showed that her screen presence was not limited to musicals or to lightness.
The film was shot in black and white, which suited its London setting and its serious theme. It did not have the popular success of Mary Poppins, released in the same year, but it has grown in reputation as a thoughtful Second World War film. For Andrews, it was an early sign that she would seek roles that tested her, even at the height of her musical fame.
Seen today, The Americanization of Emily stands out in her filmography because it asks a difficult question and does not offer an easy answer. Andrews’s Emily is the person who insists that courage matters, even when it costs dearly, and the role remains one of her most quietly impressive screen performances.