The Sound of Music
Composite Score: 87.17
Starring: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, Heather Menzies-Urich, Nicholas Hammond, Duane Chase, Angela Cartwright, Debbie Turner, Kym Karath, Anna Lee, Portia Nelson, Ben Wright, Daniel Truhitte, and Norma Varden
Director: Robert Wise
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Genres: Biography, Drama, Family, Musical, Romance, War
MPAA Rating: G
Box Office: $159.48 million worldwide
My take on Watching This Film:
The Sound of Music is the film adaptation of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical of the same name about a singing Austrian family forced to flee their homeland when the Nazis took over in 1939. The film stars Julie Andrews as aspiring nun turned governess Maria and Christopher Plummer as retired naval officer Georg von Trapp, the widower father of seven children for whom Maria comes to work. It follows Maria as she struggles to understand her place among the sisters at the abbey before being sent to serve as governess to the unruly von Trapp children where her struggles take on a more personal nature as she finds herself falling in love with the captain and finding a passion for teaching his children music and how to have fun. After an intermission, the veiled Nazi threat of the first half of the film becomes far more real, and the romantic drama shifts into a war drama culminating in an attempted escape from the Nazi takeover of Austria. The film received ten total Oscar nominations including Best Actress (Andrews) and Best Supporting Actress (Peggy Wood as Mother Abbess) and wins for Best Editing, Best Adapted Score, Best Sound, Best Director, and Best Picture. The film remains one of the most popular movie musicals of all time despite some mixed reviews from critics.
On some level, your enjoyment of The Sound of Music will directly correlate to the amount of optimism you have left in you, as the music and story drive you to this uplifted place of hope in humanity and family and positivity in the face of fascism and evil and despair. The music and story are undeniably saccharine, but that might be exactly what you need as the world grows darker around you. It is escapist filmmaking at its finest, featuring phenomenal musical numbers that’ll have you singing along almost immediately, two strong romantic leads in Andrews and Plummer (whose miss at the Academy Awards continues to baffle me, especially when you take into account either of the actor categories that year), and gorgeous shots of the Alps and Austrian villages.
Regardless of how you feel about the film’s overwhelming optimism, there’s no doubt that The Sound of Music continues to stand the test of time thanks in large part to its music and characters, especially the performances from its two leads, and it certainly deserves recognition as one of the Greatest Films of All Time. Some of its more saccharine elements simply serve to make it a stronger example of escapist filmmaking, which is what we could use more of in the echelons of critically acclaimed films these days. If you’d like to check it out, this film is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+ to watch for yourself.
