Sound Judgment

Over the years, I'd seen bits and pieces of The Sound of Music on various TV channels where it's been run more times than I can count. I'd never seen the entire movie from beginning to end, however, and recently decided to address that.

The movie has an epic pedigree, of course. It's the most successful movie musical ever; adjusted for inflation, it's actually the third highest-grossing film. Adapted from Rodgers and Hammerstein's stage production, it's stuffed full of famous songs, known to many people who might not even know they come from this show. But is it deserving of the hype?

Sort of. Mostly, perhaps. But it is now a 45-year old movie, and it carries the marks of films of that era. It's a long movie (it even has an actual intermission!), and rather slowly paced -- as per usual in the style of the time. It seems at times to "try too hard" in establishing itself as more than a mere filming of a theater production. "We're in the true European countryside, dammit!" screams the film, as it lingers indulgently on two-minute landscape shots of mountains and meadows. Of course, this completely loses sight of what made the play worth adapting in the first place.

Even though the movie clocks in at over three hours, it still suffers from some awkward cuts from the stage production. Oh, I've never seen it in a theater, but a cursory glance at the song list from the play shows a number of original tunes in the second act. These were all excised from the film, leaving only "reprises" of songs from the first act behind. (And one song written specifically for the film.) The effect of this rearranging (a word with more than one meaning here) is that the film starts to feel needlessly repetitive. It feels like no new material is being introduced in the second half of the story -- it's all simply a replay of the first half. In fact, a few songs are repeated twice in the film in their entirety, such as "My Favorite Things," "Edelweiss," and "So Long, Farewell."

But while I found the overall structure of the movie clumsy, there are still a number of specific scenes that work. For example, I griped about the repetition of the song Edelweiss, but it's actually the first occurrence of it in the film that was the movie's alteration, and it's this first scene that's one of the most effective in the film. It's the moment when Christopher Plummer's character, Captain Von Trapp, finally reconnects with his children, and lets down his facade. And it's a truly tender and touching scene.

A great moment of another sort comes in the main performance of "Do-Re-Mi." By contrast, this number is essentially devoid of any emotional content, but there's an exuberance to it all, just pure fun in the performance. It's also one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's most clever songs, with carefully crafted rounds sung between the characters.

I mentioned Christopher Plummer's fine performance already; praise is also due, of course, to Julie Andrews as Maria. The acting is perhaps a little broad by today's standards, but it's actually quite nuanced by the standards of the time. (And Maria is quite an outgoing character.)

Perhaps seeing the movie in pieces, the way I had before now, is a better way to enjoy it -- a way of enjoying the individual scenes that work, without being made aware of the overlong and repetitive way in which the whole unfolds. But I would call it a B- overall. In my book, that makes it one of the "classics" that's probably actually worth seeing.