The Sound of Music reviewed: 'a slick job' - archive, 1965
There is a French pudding known as Mont Blanc which consists of a puree of chestnuts topped with oodles of whipped cream. It is very nice, but extremely sweet and I can face it only about once a year. The Sound of Music (Dominion, from next Tuesday) is very much like the Mont Blanc: quite enjoyable if you can keep it down.
The Sound of Music review – the hills are still alive with joyous energy
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It is not, I hasten to add, the kind of film likely to be much appreciated by what one thinks of (perhaps wrongly?) as the typical Guardian reader. Films about nuns and children – especially singing nuns and children – tend to be sentimental, and The Sound of Music is no exception. Even pert Julie Andrews has been infected by the prevalent mood of the film and turns up looking and acting like a reincarnation of Lillian Gish, or, better Mary Pickford.
The story, as everyone must know after the four-year run of the play at the Palace Theatre (which, by the way, will go on even after the film opens), is a true one about the Trapp family of Austria, and how a young postulant at the Salzburg Abbey brings joy and happiness into the lives of the motherless children of Captain von Trapp, and then his own embittered heart.
The Sound of Music, 1965. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock
There are compensations, however; first and foremost being the tunes of Richard Rodgers. In spite of the peculiarly sickening Broadway bathos of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics, most (not all) of the songs are charming. Then, of course, there is the setting: the Austrian alps and rococo Salzburg. Finally, there is the considerable skill and competence of director Robert Wise.
He may be working in a vacuum, but he does a (for me, this word is not pejorative) slick job. He is helped by Julia Andrews, whom I persist in thinking has a lot of charm, and hindered by Christopher Plummer, who suggests nothing so much as a fretting Fredric March. A few months ago I wondered out loud what had become of Eleanor Parker. Now I know, and it’s not very nice.