THE SOUND OF MUSIC

The 1965 blockbuster musical THE SOUND OF MUSIC is being re-released next week for its 50th anniversary. Duck!

Rogers and Hammerstein created a musical for the fallout shelter generation. It's about a family coming together and withstanding dreadful outside threats--from thunder to Nazis--which appealed to most of the public in the age of miniskirts, student protests and Charles Manson. (Later on they'd be watching LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, voting for Ronald Reagan and buying Thomas Kincade prints.) The movie version, directed by Robert Wise (STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE), is sheer Technicolor shamelessness.

In case you've been in a fallout shelter for the last fifty years, it's about hopeless Austrian convent girl Maria (Julie Andrews, of course) being hired by strict Baron Georg Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer, who seems to have a broomstick up his fundament) to come to his impossibly lavish castle and be governess for his seven bratty kids, but she takes them on an outing and teaches them to sing, and finds out that (spoiler alert!) they're nice kids underneath, and then it turns out that (spoiler alert!) Georg is also nice underneath, then they sing some more songs and Maria and Georg start to develop mutual heat but Maria chickens out and returns to the convent, then the Abbess sings "Climb Every Mountain" and Maria returns and marries Georg, then the Nazis (including the oldest daughter's boyfriend) take over Austria and want Georg to join the Nazi navy but he's too principled and after singing at this Salzburg festival they escape across the Alps to a reprise of "Climb Every Mountain."

I'll admit I have a soft spot for "Edelweiss" and "The Lonely Goatherd." But one number represents everything unbearable about this movie. At some big high-class party these kids get trotted out to sing "So long, farewell, are we to say good night?" (Actually it's "Auf Wiedersehen, good night," but I heard it wrong in my youth.) They come out one at a time and sing about how their bedtime has arrived and generally act cute. Don't eat any popcorn before this number or it may come back up! Even as a little kid watching this movie, I felt embarrassed for these poor kids who had to come out and sing in front of all those people. At least they didn't have to dance...

It goes without saying that in typical Broadway-Hollywood fashion, this story makes a dog's dinner of the actual events it's based on. (How could I live without Wikipedia to set me straight on everything?) Maria was originally just a tutor for one of the kids, Georg was never the aloof disciplinarian the first part of the movie presents, and their marriage was at first a dispassionate business arrangement. They were broke and had to take in boarders, and their manager wasn't sleazy Max but a priest. Georg was actually tempted by the Nazi recruiters, but in the end he used his technical Italian citizenship to get them out of the country legally. (He was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that Italy took over after World War I.)

The most laughable thing in the movie comes at the start, when they refer to the story's time, just a few years before Der Fuehrer took over, as Austria's "Golden Days." Or fool's gold, at any rate.