Many of the formative films of my childhood come with crisp sense memories of the first time I saw them: precisely what cinema or whose couch, the time of day and the weather outside, who I was watching with, my in-the-moment reactions to what delights or shocks the film threw at me.
The Sound of Music, however, is an exception. Robert Wise’s swirling, swollen 1965 film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical has been a personal favourite since long before I ever thought to list personal favourites – a seasonal staple, a constant generator of unprompted earworms, a point of good-natured familial conflict between those who love it and those who merely pretend not to, a film so laden with short-cut iconography that it rushes quickly to mind when I see a certain shade of upholstery, a particular bob haircut or even a passing nun.
And yet I have no memory of the first time I saw it, where I was or who hit play on the VCR, or when that unbeatable, unshakable song score of cast-iron Broadway bangers first claimed a significant chunk of real estate in my brain. I must have been so young I didn’t exactly know what films were or how they worked; any older and those would all be vivid mental milestones. Essentially, for as long as I’ve been aware of cinema, The Sound of Music has seemed to me its very essence – if not the best movie ever made, the moviest movie ever made, a Rosetta stone for the form that everyone can read and reference and recognise.
I could identify parodies of it before I fully understood satire; its tunes would regularly surface and survive outside the context of the film, whether on Christmas compilations – stray lyrical references to snowflakes and paper packages will do that for a song – or in nursery-school singalongs. Julie Andrews may have been the first movie star I understood as just such an entity: with The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins both looming large in my childhood canon, it seemed astonishing to me that her face and voice could somehow be the driving force of both. Did all films star Julie Andrews? I youthfully wondered. It seemed to me they should.
How much of the film’s legend was founded in its first two minutes? At a conservative estimate, I’d venture 90%. That absurdly grandiose opening shot was a history-making statement of intent: that lofty, luxuriant long view of the Bavarian Alps announces both a whopping budget and a sprawling departure from the confines of the Broadway stage, before we drop and swoop into Andrews ecstatically swirling in an eye-searingly verdant meadow, as she launches into bell-clear song. To this day I misremember if the camera is spinning more than Andrews herself; the effect is so exhilarating that we feel spun along with it. Who hasn’t, on encountering an open green space, felt at least fleetingly compelled to spread their arms and whirl freely, belting out out “thaaaa hills are aliiiiiive” at the top of their lungs? Many people, probably. But it feels to me a primal urge.
It’s a moment of many types of beauty fused into one: photographic, geographic, choreographic, high kitsch and high camp. I’d distrust anyone who professes themselves unmoved by it in any way and in truth, nothing in The Sound of Music quite lives up to that vertiginous opening salvo, for all the tuneful, comforting, heart-plucking pleasures of the three hours that follow. Much of its interior drama is shot in the flat, beige house style of the era’s prestige studio cinema; beyond the perky, picturesque Salzburg location shooting of the Do-Re-Mi number, the film’s flourishes of scenic spectacle are often a mere addendum to modest, straightforward, heavily extended storytelling – a sprig of parsley on a generous plate of meatloaf.
This imbalance only became clear to me on a hungover New Year’s Day rewatch a couple of years ago: I saw The Sound of Music so many times as a child that I took a near 20-year break from the film for it to regain its fascination, or me mine. After the infallible, head-clearing tonic of that first number, I was struck by the frequent smallness and occasional stiffness of the film that once seemed to me as big as any could be. The stilted love triangle between Andrews’ impossibly winsome Maria, Christopher Plummer’s improbably handsome Captain von Trapp and Eleanor Parker’s unluckily jilted Baroness is the stuff of any dusty midcentury soap; the collective angst of the motherless von Trapp children is vaguely written and blandly performed. The film urgently needs the stakes-raising intrusion of the Nazis in its second half; the breath-held tension of its climactic escape sequence may be drafted in from another movie altogether, but necessarily so.
And yet The Sound of Music is, as ever, more than the sum of its parts. That includes not just the X-factor assets of Andrews’ peachy luminescence and the miraculous alchemy that takes place between her and her grinning onscreen brood, or the irresistibly sticky quality of even its worst songs – Something Good, specifically, which I can still sing by heart – but the unquantifiable personal associations that each viewer brings to the film. It is, for me, a work enriched by the countless quote marks that surround it now. That the already riotously chintzy Lonely Goatherd number is forever bonded in my mind with Gwen Stefani’s 2006 hip-hop makeover of the song only intensifies the glee it brings me. That I can’t see Parker’s character without mentally reciting the viral McSweeney’s letter formally announcing the cancellation of her nuptials is also the film’s benefit. As a film, The Sound of Music has always been flawed; as a culture objet, it gets ever more diamantine.
It was later in my childhood, as my affection for the film slotted into a nascent cinephilia, that I learned with some astonishment that it wasn’t universally regarded as a masterpiece – that Pauline Kael was fired from McCall’s magazine for calling it a “sugar-coated lie” and “the sound of mucus”, and that many shared in her revulsion. Later, Slavoj Zizek would term it a pro-fascist film, to cheers from detractors who have long felt pummelled by the musical’s deathless popularity. The Sound of Music was perhaps the first film to alert me to the notion of critical subjectivity, to generally agreed strata of good taste and bad taste, and to the illicit thrills of enjoying the latter.
But it’s never become a guilty pleasure: there’s too much earnest rapture in the film for that, too much honest pleasure, too much dizzily twirling joy. Film anniversaries often prompt reflections on the shortness of time, but in this case, I marvel that The Sound of Music is only 60: it’s hard to believe that cinema lived and thrived as long as it did without the film’s most enduring images, inspiring fantasy and mockery in equal measure, as elemental and immovable as the Alps themselves.
