The sixties have come and gone, and seemingly left The Sound of Music without a place in time. The most successful film ever made on its initial release in 1965, Music now seems as antiquated as many subsequent musicals looking to capitalize on its success were already beginning to when they hit cinemas. But that’s not to say that no enjoyment could be derived from Music, even if you’re watching it for the first time. Going back to it, the film seems like the rough cinematic equivalent of the giving tree. Even as you get older and more sophisticated and wizened, it’s hard not to be touched by just how much it wants to make you happy, even if its tough to go back to it in the way that you might want to.
Maria (Jule Andrews) simply doesn’t fit in with all of the nuns at Nonnberg Abbey; she sings, she’s joyous, and she has something resembling an imagination. Also, she has a tendency to break out into song whenever the feeling strikes her, such as when she is running playfully through the snow-capped mountaintops (as she does in the film’s iconic opening, which had to be shot several times because the helicopter that the camera was mounted to kept knocking her down). When a governess position opens up at the home of Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), Maria is quickly ushered away to fill it. There she finds a group of children (ranging in age from very young to ‘sixteen going on seventeen’) unresponsive to authority but cowed by the cold indifference of their father, who has almost completely run out of patience with them by the time that Maria shows up. Seeing an opportunity in the mess, Maria sets about reshaping the children’s lives from a dreary series of whistle-induced marches to a continuous display of sonorous musings on life, love, and the ominous rise of Nazism.
Any and all assessments of The Sound of Music’s success begin and end with one thing: Julie Andrews’s performance as Maria. While everyone else in the film is fine, director Robert Wise clearly placed his hopes for the film’s success on her ample shoulders, and it is a credit to her star power that the nearly three-hour running time and magnificent landscapes seem to be struggling to contain her. With her ever-present theatrical ebullience, she manages to overcome the single greatest problem that any musical faces: making the transition from dramatic scene to musical number feel organic. Most of the time, Andrews moves around with such energy that the film would have seemed undercooked had everything not exploded into synchronized motion, but such is the paradox of musical sequences that work almost too well, as the rest of the film can’t help but seem a little underwhelming in comparison. If you take to the material at all, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever be bored, but Music knows which side of the bread it’s buttered on, and it never forgets it.
At the same time, though, it may be hard to fully engage with a movie with such a limited emotional range, as even when things start to look bad, there’s never any serious threat that they won’t all end up okay. Trying to connect emotionally with the exploits of the Von Trapps is actually a pretty tall order, as direct and single-minded as Music is about bringing joy to the world, with any hint of nuance or contradiction being buried under an avalanche of smiling faces. Extrapolating to a metaphysical level, it might even be impossible to be as happy as The Sound of Music wants to make you, at least if you have any knowledge of really happened to people under the Nazis. But that might be a reflex of the era we live in, against which Music stands out almost completely. As cultures move in cycles, this one could very well come back to The Sound of Music one day, and the more cynical, self-pitying moroseness of our current media will come across as retrograde. Until then, there are certainly legions of fans tending to its legacy, and making sure that nobody forgets the words to ‘My Favorite Things’.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
On top of its digital remastering (which looks stunning), there is a commentary with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, and director Robert Wise, a Music Machine Sing Along, and Your Favorite Things, an interactive enhancement that includes trivia, behind-the-scenes photos, and location information. The second disc contains many different features, most prominently Musical Stages, an interactive guide to the making of the film with a layout based on that of the Von Trapp family, and A City of Song, a virtual tour of filming locations in Salzburg, Austria. There's also a collection of different vintage programs relating to both The Sound of Music and Rodgers and Hammerstein (most of them from different reissues of the film), a CBS parody of the stage show entitled the Pratt family singers, an episode of The Julie Andrews Hour featuring Maria Von Trapp, galleries, an introduction with Julie Andrews, a number of interviews, and probably every advertisement that has ever been published in relation to the film.
"The Sound of Music" is on sale November 2, 2010 and is rated G. Musical. Directed by Robert Wise. Written by Ernest Lehman(screenplay), Howard Lindsay(book), Russel Crouse(book). Starring Christopher Plummer, Julie Andrews, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, Heather Menzies, Nicholas Hammond, Duane Chase, Angela Cartwright, Debbie Turner, Kym Karath.
