The Sound of Music 60th Anniversary
The Hills Are Alive again! It’s sixty years since Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical was released on film. Despite some caustic reviews, it was an immediate hit and has been regularly screened since as a Christmas Day movie – shown 15 times since the BBC bought the rights in the 1990s – and is apparently part of the BBC’s collection of films which will be shown in the event of a nuclear disaster. At least someone reckons we’ll last for 174 minutes. I first saw it with my parents at a cinema in Liverpool, and remember the nerve-racking ending more than any of the songs. Later as an usherette at Edinburgh’s Odeon, my best-ever student holiday job, I learned that some of the full-timers had worked throughout the film’s two year plus run. Madge told us that you could never see a good film often enough. (You can find my lockdown reminiscences of the Odeon in the late 60s on the EMR website) In the early 2000s, many people will remember Sing-a-Long-a-Sound of Music, subtitled with the lyrics, which became a popular night out for families and work mates. It was eventually franchised but these early showings were a lot of fun with genuinely imaginative costumes -who could forget the traffic being halted to allow seven adults dressed in curtain-material to cross over to the Festival Theatre?
Richard Rodgers’ second major partnership was with Oscar Hammerstein. As you can hear on Donald Macleod’s Composer of the Week (15-19 September) Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) always knew he wanted to compose. His relaxed parents allowed him to go on his own to see Broadway musicals from the age of nine: he paid for a seat in the gods and tipped an usher to let him move to a better seat. By his 20s his partnership with Lorenz Hart was so successful that they had two shows in New York and one in London running simultaneously and were each earning $5000 a week, a sum only matched at that time by George Gershwin. (A famous story recounts how Gershwin visiting Paris asked his hero Ravel for lessons in composition: Ravel said that on the contrary he wished Gershwin could teach him how to make money.) Hart’s alcoholism, which later caused his early death in 1943, led to the partnership breaking up, and by 1941 Rodgers had found a new writing partner in Oscar Hammerstein II. His compositional style had to change: Rodgers wrote the music first then Hart wrote the lyrics, while Hammerstein preferred to complete his lyrics before Rodgers wrote the tune. Hart’s lyrics were memorable for their wit while Hammerstein’s songs were more sentimental.
This partnership was even more successful. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s five big musicals, ‘Oklahoma’, ‘Carousel’, ‘South Pacific’, ‘The King and I’, and ‘The Sound of Music’ were all long-running stage musicals and later block-buster films. The first two were musically innovative – ‘Oklahoma’ included a long ballet sequence, and Billy Bigelow’s extended reflective monologue in ‘Carousel’ had operatic leanings. And they were prepared to tackle the difficult subject of racism in ‘South Pacific’ and ‘The King and I’. During the pre-Broadway tour of ‘South Pacific’, Rodgers and Hammerstein instructed theatre managements in Southern states that audiences should not be segregated.
Their last musical ‘The Sound of Music’ was completed in 1959 shortly before Oscar Hammerstein’s death. Their second musical about a governess and based like ‘The King and I’ on a true story, it relied less on Maria von Trapp’s 1949 memoir than on the German (non-musical) films, ‘The Trapp Family’ (1956) and ‘The Trapp Family in America’ (1958) which used it as a source. Even now these films are far more popular in Austria than ‘The Sound of Music’, which is scorned as inauthentic, with particular umbrage taken at the suggestion that ‘Edelweiss’ was an Austrian national song. The musical ran for 1500 performances on Broadway.
Filming of ‘The Sound of Music’ took place firstly in Austria then, for many of the interior shots, in Hollywood in 1964, and it was released in the US in March 1965. Within eighteen months it was the highest grossing film of all time. The practice both in the States and here of limiting its run to selected cinemas was probably a large reason for its success. It was a special occasion treat, with numbered seats and an interval. Most cinemas then ran a continuous programme with a main feature, a B movie, ads and newsreels.
On Sunday night the recently restored Filmhouse Cinema 1 is full for the Anniversary showing with an intergenerational audience including families with small children and groups of young people, as well as those who remember it the first time. In a very modern introduction, stills from the film are projected on the screen, so that we can take selfies. The new print looks glorious, and we’re soon immersed in the story, which is often surprisingly funny. The exciting action is crammed into the second half but there’s enough activity and character development to keep the audience interested. It’s a musical, but Julie Andrews as Maria is the only solo singer who has a complete singing part. Max and the Baroness’s songs were cut from the film. Most of Maria’s and the children’s songs are accompanied by choreographed movement. Maria’s monologue ‘I have Confidence’ with “recitative” followed by choruses is delivered walking, and while the children sit down to learn ‘Do-re-mi’, its elaborations and reprises are accompanied by non-stop activity including cycling around Salzburg.
The film is driven by the relationship between Maria and the Captain. Christopher Plummer, as has often been reported, was no great fan of “the sound of mucus” and he had taken some persuasion to take part. Julie Andrews too wanted assurances that her role would be much less “sweet” than in the stage musical. Both worked with the director before filming to make their characters stronger. Plummer especially “helped change a character lacking substance into a stronger, more forceful complex figure with a wry sense of humor and a darker edge,” a US critic noted. He had played Benedick in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ at Stratford Ontario and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early sixties and he surely brought some of that character’s panache to the ‘merry war’ with the governess. And just as in the best Jane Austen screen interpretations when the would-be lovers use the set dances to reveal their feelings, so here the couple’s participation in the Ländler is the most sexually-charged scene in the film (all relative, of course in a family entertainment!)
That scene is the catalyst for the Baroness’s showdown with Maria. Eleanor Parker, who plays her was the best known screen actress in the cast, and she skilfully blends her neediness with the wiles needed to chase off her rival. As Maria returns to the Abbey, the first half ends and ‘Intermission’ is displayed on the screen. A film interval, rare nowadays was the usual practice in musicals and longer movies in the 1960s. The second half preceded by the Ent’racte (also in curly script on the screen) is brisker than the first. With advice from the Abbess (Peggy Wood) to ‘Climb Every Mountain’ Maria returns to the villa, where the children have forgotten how to sing in her absence. The Baroness is let down fairly gently by von Trapp, giving Parker the show’s best line “And out there is a young woman who will never be a nun”. The big love scene – ‘I Must Have Done Something Good’ like that of Liesl and the postman boyfriend takes place in the gazebo. A lavish wedding with chorus of nuns ensues. Then the panorama of ringing bells drops to the city square where the swastika flag now flies. The Anschluss has taken place while the couple are on their honeymoon and Captain von Trapp, has been summoned to Bremerhaven. (The real life von Trapp was a successful submarine commander in the Imperial Navy based at Trieste during WWI. Initially tempted by the Nazi’s commission as an opportunity to work with the latest technology, his political opposition to fascism persuaded him otherwise).
The last part of the film is genuinely gripping cinema. The family’s escape by car is halted, and they use the Salzburg Song Festival as their alibi. In the night scenes beams of light build up tension – headlights of the Nazi staff car, spotlights in the auditorium and torch lights as the family hides in the abbey graveyard. Liesl’s former boyfriend hesitates and von Trapp coaxes him to give up his gun, the pursuit is foiled by two savvy nuns who disable the cars, and the family are last seen climbing the Alps , heading directly, as some commentators have noted, in the direction of Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’ at Berchtesgaten!
The key song in the last section is ‘Edelweiss’, in which Rodgers and Hammerstein have done that difficult thing, write an authentic-sounding anthem. Apart from the love-duet Chrisopher Plummer has little to sing, and ‘Edelweiss,’ first heard in the family setting is identified as his song. When he breaks down singing and he encourages the Austrian audience, seated behind Nazi officials in the front row, to join in, the song becomes a powerful anti-Nazi statement. Interestingly Kander and Ebb’s ‘Cabaret’, set in 1930s Berlin which opened on Broadway in 1966 contains an “authentic” Nazi anthem - the chilling ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’.
Most of the large Filmhouse audience remains enthusiastic, with a round of applause at the interval and the end. Anniversary showings have recently become a staple of art-house cinema programming, often reaching a larger mixed-age audience than new releases.
Thanks to Donald Macleod for his insights in Composer of the Week, Richard Rodgers, still available on BBC Sounds
Also to Wikipedia for helpful articles and links
