The Sound of Music

We're screening the singalong version...

Here are my notes:

The Sound of Music


USA 1965 174 minutes

Director: Robert Wise

Starring: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn and Peggy Wood

Nominations and Awards

• Won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture

• A further 10 wins and 10 nominations


“The movie was the second collaboration of producer-director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman – they had killed West Side Story a few years earlier, which was a more serious crime than making The Sound of Music because the latter had always been brain-dead.”

David Thomson

Maria (Julie Andrews), a young novice leaves an Austrian convent to become a governess to the children of Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), a Naval officer widower.

The film is based on the 1959 stage musical Rodgers and Hammerstein, which itself derived from two West German films: The Trapp Family and The Trapp Family in America. Originally the plan had been for a stage play about the Trapp family which included songs from their repertoire, but this quickly evolved into a full blown musical with all new songs which ran for more than three years on Broadway and which has enjoyed regular revivals since then. The film excluded several songs from the original stage show and included several new songs which have been retained in subsequent stage revivals.

The story of the musical makes significant changes to the real story: Maria Von Trapp was a tutor to just one of the children rather than a governess to the whole family; they lived in Austria for several years after their marriage and had two further children before going into exile; and when the family did go into exile it was by train to Italy, as Captain Von Trapp had Italian citizenship through being born in territory held by Italy after the First World War (and from a geographical perspective Switzerland does not share a mountainous border with Salzburg).

Robert Wise started his career an editor on Citizen Kane (1941) and then worked as assistant director on Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) before directing The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for Val Lewton. He directed several more horror films before he turned to noir with the thriller Born To Kill (1947) and his subsequent films encompassed science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)), board room drama (Executive Suite (1954)) and historical epic (Helen of Troy (1956)) before he won his first Oscar for Best Director with West Side Story (1961). He preceded The Sound of Music with the terrifying horror film The Haunting (1963) and followed it with The Sand Pebbles (1966), which secured him an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. He carried on working up to the late 1970s where he directed the first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). He died in 2005.

Despite his ability to work in and master so many genres Martin Scorsese has argued that his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify him as an artist and not merely an artisan who allowed a story that a studio assigned to dictate his style.

Star Trek

In the great Star Trek versus Doctor Who debate I've always sided with the latter - even before its triumphant renaissance under Russell T Davies. However I have to admit that the film we screened on Sunday was pretty good, and that it deserves its five star review from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Here are my notes:

Star Trek

USA 2009 (127 minutes)
Director: J J Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana and Simon Pegg

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Makeup
A further 11 wins and 45 nominations

James T Kirk meets the half-human Spock while training at the Starfleet Academy. Kirk stows away on the USS Enterprise and together with other cadets like Nyota Uhura, Hiikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekhov has an adventure at the final frontier.

Star Trek first appeared in 1966 as a TV series that ran for three seasons before spawning four more spin-off TV series based in the same universe but with different sets of characters. In the cinema there were 10 Star Trek films featuring initially the (ageing) cast of the initial TV series followed by the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are also many novels, comic books and video games, although purists consider these to be non-canonical.

The commercial failure of Star Trek Nemesis (2002) effectively killed the official Star Trek franchise in the cinema and it was not until 2005 that Paramount chose to reboot it with a story featuring the cast of the initial TV series portrayed by a new cast. The script is by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzan who previously had worked with J J Abrams on Mission: Impossible III (2006) – another successful film franchise based on a hit TV show from the 1960s. Initially Abrams had intended only to produce the film, but decided to direct it as soon as he read the script as “I would be so agonisingly envious of whoever stepped in and directed the movie”. The writers were keen to avoid a complete reboot and thus it was important to them to cast Leonard Nimoy in the film. His performance as the older Spock is one of quiet dignity; and it is his voice over the final credits speaking the legendary words about the mission to seek out new life and new civilisations - amended to meet the politically correct requirements of a new millennium - where no one has gone before.

J J Abrams made his name as a writer and producer of eight films before making his debut as a director with Mission: Impossible III (2008). He followed this by producing the science fiction film Cloverfield (2008) before reverting to the role of director for Star Trek. His current future projects include producing Cloverfield 2 and Mission: Impossible IV as well as a possible commitment to direct an as yet untitled sequel to Star Trek. He has a parallel career in television where his credits include co-creating, writing, producing and directing Lost (2004-2010).