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.
