The cinemas are alive with The Sound of Music once more as the classic musical returns to the big screen. With five Oscars under its belt, legions of devoted fans including those prone to dressing up and singing along, and having taken so much box-office cash that it is in the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time, The Sound of Music is comfortably, and indisputably, a resounding hit. Take a bow, Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Rodgers and Hammerstein, director Robert Wise, all the warbling Von Trapp children and even that saucy, if wooden, yodelling goatherd – you created a movie that is inordinately beloved. However, the question many word-perfect fans may not want to ask is this: is The Sound of Music actually any good?
On the film’s first release in 1965, the answer from most critics was a flat no. In the UK, Monthly Film Bulletin called the three-hour tale of a gamine postulate who gives seven precocious children and their uptight widowed father the gift of music and affection “an exceedingly sugary experience” whipped up from ingredients “that might have been bearable if the songs had been better”. Other critics gagged on that taste, with noted grump Bosley Crowther describing it in the New York Times as “cosy-cum-corny”. Others took exception not just to its sweetness but its distortion of history. As with the original stage musical, the film is set in Austria on the cusp of the Nazi invasion. Courting a family audience, however, the film drastically dilutes the threat of fascism. In Vogue, Joan Didion lambasted “its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind”. Most famously, Pauline Kael called it “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat ... and this is the attitude that makes a critic feel that maybe it’s all hopeless. Why not just send the director, Robert Wise, a wire: ‘You win, I give up’?”
Why not, indeed, as audiences and the Academy took little note of those negative notices. In fact, perhaps the recent success of The Greatest Showman, as well as other fan favourites such as Mamma Mia! (which Peter Bradshaw called a “soulless panto”), tell us critics and audiences want very different things from a musical. Where reviewers found The Sound of Music slow, sugary and mendacious, audiences discovered a heartwarming story about childhood, and a series of catchy, upbeat songs.
Dr Martha Shearer, a musicals expert at King’s College London, takes issue with the critics: “There’s some kind of implication that the audience for this film is either too stupid to pick up on how bad it is. Or that they’ve been tricked.”
On the contrary, The Sound of Music delivers exactly the responses it promises: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll be humming My Favourite Things for weeks afterwards. Where critics see manipulation, audiences applaud what composer and broadcaster Neil Brand calls “Hollywood professionalism of the highest order”. The film pivots on Julie Andrews’s inarguably excellent performance as Maria – she not only sings with great skill and charm, but no doubt also brought lots of audience goodwill and a useful aura of maternal efficiency from her performance in Mary Poppins the previous year.
Brand agrees that some reviewers are allergic to song-and-dance shows: “The musical is the easiest genre to denigrate on the basis of its artifice alone. You can either accept the artifice of ‘real’ people suddenly bursting into song and dance, or you can’t.” Shearer discerns a gender angle too, whether the critic in question is male or female: “There can be a tendency amongst critics to be particularly dismissive of musicals and of mainstream films that are coded as feminine in some way.”
The Greatest Showman, argues Shearer, triumphs because from its opening number on, it tells audiences to sit back and enjoy the spectacle. “It’s so overt and it even has a critic character who can’t appreciate the show because he can’t appreciate joy.” The Sound of Music does something similar. Right at the beginning of the film the nuns debate the question: how do you solve a problem like Maria? They’re effectively asking whether we should enjoy her effervescent spirit or condemn her for breaking the rules. Whose side are you on?
There is also more than one way to watch The Sound of Music. Viewing it as a dramatisation of a true story from the Anschluss is not the best approach. Most of us watch the film first when we’re a child, and subsequently enjoy the ritual of its slowly unfolding plot and frequent song reprisals with the comfort of nostalgia – not for nothing was its first UK TV broadcast on Christmas Day. Many, people, including academic Stacy Wolf, read androgynous Maria as radiating “delicious queerness”. Alternatively you can wallow in the film’s toothsome charms as the last gasp of the family-friendly studio musical before the climate changed and the genre went in darker directions.
It’s even possible to enjoy being manipulated. “Its recognition of how ridiculous it is, is part of the pleasure of it,” argues Shearer. For Brand, Andrews alone is worth the price of admission. “She is the phenomenon,” he says. “To be able to play an Austrian with impeccable English vowels, to make us concerned for her because she’s the politest rebel in all cinema, to be able to make singing sound exciting whilst never giving the impression it is anything but radiantly enjoyable, above all to challenge Audrey Hepburn in the tomboy stakes.” Just like Captain Von Trapp himself, we may start out sceptical but soon find ourselves to warming to plucky Maria and her guitar.
We shouldn’t forget that even Kael herself was susceptible. That line about the “sugar-coated lie” refers to The Sound of Music all right, but it comes from an aside in a review of a later film, The Singing Nun, for McCall’s. Her initial assessment of the movie, in an unsigned note for the New Yorker, admitted she was not immune to its contrivances and charms and praised Plummer’s “sinister, archly decadent performance”.
“Whom could this operetta offend?” she wrote. “Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.” Did Kael exit the cinema singing Edelweiss? Perhaps she should have sent that note of surrender to Wise after all.
- The Sound of Music plays in 70mm at BFI Southbank from 18 May before touring.
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