The Sound of Music is a nearly three-hour-long musical about an Austrian nun teaching some spoiled Austrian kids how to sing. I hope that’s explanation enough for why it took me well over three decades to watch this classic film. When I was a little kid, I didn’t want to watch musicals, period. They were verboten in little boy culture—a toxic hazard, like antique stores, asparagus and girl butts. My mom was (and still is, I’m pretty sure) a huge fan of musicals, but no mother is Icarus-like enough to try to get her snotty little jerk to plow through a three-hour musical history lesson. As I grew into my teens and my film fandom developed, I developed more patience for older films, but I wanted to watch R-rated adult stuff; mature, edgy classics like The French Connection, The Godfather and First Blood. Sound of Music was just too stodgy and clean. As I’ve grown into what can medically be described as an “adult,” I’ve gradually come to appreciate and enjoy musicals. Hell, I even write a regular column about opera.
Nonetheless, when this assignment landed on my desk, I was still somewhat apprehensive. It’s kind of hard to explain why that was, but I’ll do my best to articulate it again: The Sound of Music is a nearly three-hour musical about an Austrian nun teaching some spoiled Austrian kids how to sing. Added to this: Julie Andrews never did much for me. Mary Poppins was all about the cartoon penguins as far as I’m concerned. Some of the songs I was familiar with from the film were far from favorites of mine: “The Sound of Music” and “Climb Every Mountain” always seemed forced and corny to me.
But by god, it’s partially my job to watch famous movie musicals for the first time—and not coincidentally, the 5th Avenue Theatre’s production of The Sound of Music is currently running through January 3. And so, a few nights ago, I brought home the Blu-ray and hunkered down. Here are some of the things that I learned.
This movie is absolutely wonderful.
You hear me, myself before three days ago? YOU ARE A FOOL. It turns out that there’s a reason this movie is beloved by all. How about that? So, all of those people that made it one of the biggest box-office smashes in film history, all of the academy voters who gave it approximately five thousand Oscars, all of the people at the AFI who placed it at #40 on the top 100 films of all time… I guess they weren’t totally full of crap, hard as that may be to believe. This movie is GREAT.
Robert Wise—whose work I’ve always admired—directed the bejesus out of it, as he is wont to do. The film begins with a spectacular helicopter shot pushing in on Julie Andrews swooning in the greenest field imaginable amidst an utterly spectacular mountain backdrop and it just keeps getting more impressive from there. It’s a three-hour movie that flies by at a breakneck pace. Julie Andrews is iconic in a challenging role. Those kids, those damned Von Trapp kids are the cutest damned things in the entire world. It’s just pure, heart-warming, life-affirming, toe-tapping goodness. One of the best representations of the kind of premium product Hollywood was occasionally capable of in the mid 20th century. I’ve watched three musicals for this column so far. I liked Dirty Dancing more than I thought I would, I tolerated Grease (barely), but I LOVED The Sound of Music.
I have pretty much seen half of this already through cultural osmosis.
This is one of the biggest, greatest, most cherished films ever made. The first half contained almost no surprises because I’d heard all of the songs or absorbed the rest through film and TV references, clips, retrospectives, conversations, MST3K quips, you name it. It reminded me of the first time I saw Casablanca or read Hamlet; about every other minute I thought, “Oh, this is where that line and/or image comes from!” Song-wise, everybody knows “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi,” but “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” was one of the songs my mom would belt out while dancing around the house to embarrass me while my friends were over. I recognized another song because it was referenced in “I Believe” from Book of Mormon (of which I have the original cast recording). The Sound of Music is built into the cultural framework of Western society, like Star Wars and Mozart. Now I understand why.
Robert Wise was a saint.
It was WC Fields who famously said, “I don’t like working with kids, now go fetch me seven gallons of scotch.” Thousands of other people have no doubt expressed similar sentiments (with or without the scotch), and there’s a good reason for that: kids are kids. They’re not famed for their reason, professionalism or cooperativeness. And poor, poor Mr. Wise had to handle seven of these things (well, to be fair, the older kids could’ve been in their 30s for all I know) for a movie that includes many, many elaborate song and dance numbers. If you want a really good example of setting the difficulty level for directing a scene to Maximum, look no further than the biking sequence in “Do-Re-Mi.” This is eight people, many of them children, all of them singing AND doing choreographed bike moves while a giant camera tracks alongside them in a truck. Just imagine the logistics of that. I promise you that these days they would do this all with CGI and then they’d say “Thank God we have CGI.” My best guess is that it took them fifty-six billion takes to get that shot. That kind of patience and dedication is astonishing, but a lot of this movie has that “we’re not going to settle for anything less than perfect” kind of feel. It’s a highly polished gem, and I have no idea how Wise managed to live into his 90s after weathering that kind of stress.
The “So Long, Farewell” scene is absolutely intolerable.
If you are one of the deranged few who have still not seen this movie (what is wrong with you?), there is a scene in which the Von Trapp family is having a lavish party and the kids must go to bed. What happens next is absolutely one of the most shameless and brutal things that has ever happened in the history of film. The kids perform a song wherein each one of them bids High Austrian Society “So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, adieu.” Then, one by one, they get kicked in the butt and prance up the stairs. Because the people who made this film are impossibly cruel, the bit ends mercilessly with the littlest girl being too tired to make it up the stairs, so she falls asleep in a little singing heap, so the other kids must scoop her up and carry her off as they all softly sing “goodbyyyyeee.” The partygoers down below wave up to them and reply “goodbyyyyye.” It is death by cuteness. It is demonic and unfair. It grabs you by the softest part of your soul and punches it in the balls repeatedly until you want to die. I can’t stand it. It’s the best.
Nazis? Nazis!
But that’s okay, because there are Nazis in this movie! Nothing even remotely cute about those guys! The Nazis are only a vague peripheral threat until the final third of the movie, when Anschluss finally drops. The big red swastika banners are particularly jarring when they arrive, as this is almost entirely a movie about love and life and loving life and impossible cuteness until the very last act. I vaguely knew that there were Nazis in The Sound of Music, but of all of the things that I had culturally absorbed about the film, I literally had no idea how it ended. So when Captain Von Trapp, Maria and the kids run afoul of the Third Reich, it was actually pretty damn suspenseful for me. Sure, I thought that it was somewhat unlikely that this adorable singing family with whom I’d just shared so many delightful adventures would be gunned down by goose-stepping monsters, but I didn’t know for sure.
But that’s okay, because there are Nazis in this movie! Nothing even remotely cute about those guys! The Nazis are only a vague peripheral threat until the final third of the movie, when Anschluss finally drops. The big red swastika banners are particularly jarring when they arrive, as this is almost entirely a movie about love and life and loving life and impossible cuteness until the very last act. I vaguely knew that there were Nazis in The Sound of Music, but of all of the things that I had culturally absorbed about the film, I literally had no idea how it ended. So when Captain Von Trapp, Maria and the kids run afoul of the Third Reich, it was actually pretty damn suspenseful for me. Sure, I thought that it was somewhat unlikely that this adorable singing family with whom I’d just shared so many delightful adventures would be gunned down by goose-stepping monsters, but I didn’t know for sure.
And you know what? If you are one of the warped fools who have still not bothered to watch this three-hour musical about an Austrian nun teaching some spoiled Austrian kids how to sing, I’m not going to spoil it for you here. You just have to experience it for the first time for yourself. And you really, really should. Millions upon millions of people (and now—finally—me) can’t be wrong. And go check it out onstage if you can. I’d like to go too, but I’m not sure I could handle it. Goodbyyyyyyye.