The Sound of Music

About time for another movie review, this time: the Sound of Music, which I got some time ago on DVD. This is the Rodgers & Hammerstein movie musical from 1965. A great love story. Christopher Plummer is great as the "bug up his ass" uptight Captain. The kids – Liesel, Friedrich, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta and Gretl – are all cute. The Baroness is pretty and jaded. Max Detweiler is clever and cynical. The nuns can’t stand "fraulein Maria". And Julie Andrews, of course, is beautiful and easy to fall in love with. As I probably noted earlier, the final parts of them escaping from the Nazis after the Anschluss are a letdown.

 I also watched the "extra features" on this (disc 2), which were moderately entertaining. I won’t vomit a river of useless information, but some points are worth making:

 1. The story was put into movie form before the R&H movie. The original movies were German, Die Trapp-Familie (The Trapp Family, 1956) and a sequel, Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958). Then it was put into musical format in 1959 by R&H. In the musical, Maria von Trapp was played by Mary Martin.

 2. Fraulein Maria and Cap’n Von Trapp actually married in 1927. The Anschluss didn’t take place until 1938. So 11 years are suddenly compacted. They certainly didn’t return from their honeymoon to find a Nazi flag flying from their house. Moreover, as even I knew, Salzburg is across the river from... Germany! So they could not hike across the mountains to safety, as the nearest country is the one they’re trying to escape. In reality, they took a train to Italy and then went to the US. Heinrich Himmler took over the von Trapp’s house and used it as his headquarters. Of course that house was NOT the one used in the film.

 3. Von Trapp was a submarine captain in what must have been the Austro-Hungarian Navy in WWI. He was actually intrigued and tempted by the possibility of being a German U-Boat captain, but turned it down.  

 4. They interview the actors who portrayed the children, now 42 years older, of course. The girl who played Liesel, Charmian Carr, was actually 21, not 16. So she is now 63. She is still astonishingly attractive. Oddly, the little girl, Kym Karath, who played Gretl, the youngest girl, is now very attractive – almost like Morgan Fairchild. The actresses portraying Marta and Brigitta, Debbie Turner and Angela Cartwright, look very similar to each other. The guy who played Friedrich, Nicholas Hammond, now looks like Cliff Robertson. All the children actors are American.

 5. The only one of the actual von Trapp family they interview is Gregor von Trapp, who is a step-sibling to the others, as Maria von Trapp is his mother. He was a useful source of information.

 6. They interviewed Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Unlike "Gone With The Wind", dating from 1939 with lots of the main people now long dead, "The Sound of Music" is recent enough that practically everyone (except Hammerstein) is still alive, even the director.

 7. With any actor portraying a role, the essence is that they are..."acting", which is to say that the person they portray on screen is not necessarily anything like the actor, and in fact may not even resemble the person being portrayed, either, but some synthesis between the two. According to Plummer, the Fraulein Maria we saw portrayed by Julie Andrews, though, is very much Julie Andrews herself.

 8. The real Maria von Trapp was on the movie set, somewhat like the real Frank Serpico showed up to watch them make the movie about him. In both cases, the real person chafed at having no control over the portrayal. By all accounts, Maria von Trapp circa 1964 was very domineering and bossy.  People who visited their music camp in Vermont came back to report that the Captain and Maria had a relationship like the King and Queen of Hearts from "Alice in Wonderland":  "Who's been painting my roses red?!?"

 9. "Edelweiss" is not a real Austrian folk song, merely R&H’s extremely convincing appoximation of one, just as "New Cumberland Blues" (on Workingman’s Dead) was Robert Hunter & the Grateful Dead’s attempt at a West Virginia mountain country folk song, so well done that miners (!!!) have complimented the band on having discovered some long lost song, when they actually wrote it from scratch themselves. It was the last song they wrote together – for any musical – before Hammerstein died. Rodgers actually had to write two songs, "I Have Confidence" and "Something Good" by himself to wind up the film’s set.

Note: Plummer and William Shatner are both from Montreal and both auditioned for the role of Captain Von Trapp, and also the role of Captain Kirk on Star Trek, which we know went to Plummer and Shatner, but the roles could have been reversed.  Shatner managed to get Plummer into the sixth Star Trek movie, the Undiscovered Country, as Klingon captain Chang.   

 What’s great about the film is watching Maria and the Captain fall in love with each other. There is that peak when the Baroness and the Captain are talking on the balcony, and the Baroness – a shrewd woman – can read the writing on the wall. Both of them can tell what’s going on. And finally the Captain goes down to the gazebo....and we know what happens next.