The Sound of Music
Robert Wise (1965)
Seeing The Sound of Music for the first time in eight years – and eleven years after its original release – was very enjoyable. This is an important film in that it displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing picture of all time but it didn’t, as was feared in 1965, herald a spate of like-minded and comparably successful movie musicals – a prospect dreaded by Pauline Kael in her famous review, entitled ‘The Sound of Money’. Attempted blockbusters made in the years that followed proved cripplingly expensive for the industry – Doctor Dolittle, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Hello, Dolly! were among the costly box-office failures. As Julie Andrews’s Maria says (twice), ‘God never closes a door without opening a window’ and The Sound of Music can be seen as indirectly responsible for killing off these sprawling musicals. It’s not unlikely that the extraordinary quality of Cabaret (1972), a very different kettle of fish that’s had huge critical and popular success, will do for would-be emulators in a similar way and for even longer, although the forthcoming screen versions of the ‘classy’ musicals A Little Night Music and A Chorus Line may prove otherwise[1].
It may have an Alpine setting but The Sound of Music is the Mount Everest of popular cinema. This is many people’s favourite movie of all time and Odeon cinemas seem very pleased to have it back. They’ve devised a new legend for the poster, in honour of the picture’s enduring allure: ‘You can’t beat the best’. In the mid-sixties, when I was a child, The Sound of Music had a legendary reputation. We didn’t believe the film would ever be shown in York because, people said, our screens just weren’t big enough to accommodate it. Pilgrimages were made to Leeds. My mother took me, when I was ten. After we’d queued patiently outside the cinema, I found the film a bit boring for about the first hour. I remember forcing myself to laugh during ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ and this somehow worked: I started laughing genuinely and things picked up from that point. If they hadn’t, I’d have pretended otherwise. Any word said against The Sound of Music was frowned upon among my friends and our parents. I saw it again two years later and enjoyed it much more.
I’d forgotten until this third viewing how strongly its songs are ingrained in my memory. Re-experiencing the sentimental impact of ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ and the reprise of ‘Maria’ at the heroine’s wedding to Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) was emotionally powerful. Although the clunkiness of the dialogue and the sustained manipulativeness of Robert Wise’s direction are more obvious and irritating now, the basic strengths of The Sound of Music are unchanged: it’s supremely self-confident and, as the movie cliché goes, ‘it moves’. Three hours long, it’s streamlined beside clumsy, post-Cabaret attempts at wholesome family musicals like Mame, Lost Horizon and The Slipper and the Rose (although parts of Bryan Forbes’s film are all right). It’s ironic, though, that so many of its diehard fans adore The Sound of Music for its niceness, see it as a good deed in a weary world. It’s an all-time great as a piece of commercial calculation.
[1976]
[1] Afternote: They didn’t. Hal Prince’s film of A Little Night Music was poorly received in 1977 and A Chorus Line proved not to be even ‘forthcoming’. Richard Attenborough’s screen version finally arrived in 1985 and was a critical and commercial failure.