The Sound of Music (1965)

 

We're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the film The Sound of Music, released in 1965. It was adapted from the Broadway musical that opened in 1959 and ran for more than 1,400 performances. Its stage production has been in revival a few times, but the movie has been a perennial holiday release on television for generations.

Though based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp, the Austrian postulate-turned-governess-turned-Nazi-resister and her family, the movie is a fairly sanitized treatment of the rise of the Third Reich. There are no scenes of mass arrests and deportations or concentration camps. Just an ominous feeling for those aware of the history. (Unlike the starkness of Sophie's Choice and Schindler's List, for example.)

You can't blame folks for missing the underlying ugliness in the picture when they are distracted by pretty music and pretty scenery and pretty people.

And I guess that's what's fascinated me about network TV's scheduling of the movie during the holidays. It's most decidedly NOT A Christmas Story, even though "Edelweiss" is sublime.

I do like the subplot about lovestruck Liesl von Trapp and her Nazi Youth beau Rolf Gruber. They represent for me tyranny's seductive quality and the sobering realization that, unlike in Oklahoma and The King and I, also Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, love does NOT conquer all.

Rolf and Liesl's lovely courtship number in the garden ("Sixteen Going on Seventeen") is a high point of Act One and serves as a nice counterpoint to a similar moment between the Captain and Maria in Act Two ("Something Good"). But young Rolf, the officious telegram deliverer, would be the one to blow the whistle on Liesl and the Von Trapps, showing his true love was named Adolf.

Maybe this year, in anticipation of what the future might hold for this country, folks will watch TSOM with new eyes and ears and resolve to kick Rolf to the curb before it's too late.