The Sound of Music works, there's no denying that. Savant resisted its charms for years because of its insipid treatment of Nazi Evil being oh-so easily conquered by the supposedly unstoppable power of love, music and saccharine charm. I never liked movies about 'cute' nuns and priests - The Bells of St. Mary's with its 'romantic' subtext between Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman always revolted me. Escapism is good and it's needed, but in his younger days I associated the appeal of this picture with the inability of the public to face reality. Complacent folk would point to The Sound of Music as proof of goodness in the world, and my head would spin. The same thing happened about seventeen years later when a group of adults was insulted because I told them I felt that E.T. the Extraterrestrial was unfit entertainment for children!

Well, a lot of time has passed and I can see that my sympathies were in the right place but my perspective was more than a little narrow. The Sound of Music is not the opiate of the masses and I had no particular corner on cynical wisdom. The movie is saccharine but it's not a tooth-decay picture on the order of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It simplifies the Von Trapps into an ideal family unit that simply takes a walk in the hills to evade the pernicious Nazi authorities ... but it doesn't make any blanket statement that the Reich could be so easily fooled by everybody. As for those cutesy nuns that ask forgiveness for mischievously sabotaging the Nazi vehicles to abet the Von Trapp escape, they are ..... still pretty unforgiveable! I guess the filmmakers can be forgiven for not showing the Abbey sisters being sent to concentration camps for their part in the Von Trapp escape. Ah, if this is just the first couple of months of the Anschluss, maybe they could get away with it all.

With those gripes out of the way, it's easier to concentrate on just how smartly Robert Wise and his confectioners have put together The Sound of Music. Wise was frequently criticized as a director more interested in efficiency than working with actors or suprising us in the drama department. But he's always had a good graphic sense and with his stellar team of designers The Sound of Music is as handsome as movies get. The opening aerial shots of the Austrian Alps are a calculated repeat of the beginning of West Side, a super-travelogue for the View-Master crowd. Then Julie Andrews comes running across a grassy meadow to the opening bars of the Rodgers and Hammerstein score, and the work of winning over 95% of the middle-class audience is done.

I remember hearing "Ahs" of approval with every new view of the Von Trapp estate, every mountain meadow, every incredibly photogenic cobbled lane in town. Wise and editor William Reynolds employ different design ideas on a few songs, like the now-overused trick of jumping a continuous song across multiple locations. Most efforts just replay the stage situations in parlor rooms, Maria's bedroom or other harmonious surroundings. But very little time passes before Wise hits us with another pleasing visual, like Maria walking slowly through a line of white-barked trees, left to right as she sings. Late-night meetings at the summer house amid a lot of symmetrical compositions have a slight fairy tale quality that's pleasing to the eye. Reynolds was quoting as saying that every sticky editing problem had a solution: When in doubt, cut to Julie Andrews. In the design department, only the supposed folk music festival comes up a little short, as it takes place in a cold stone amphitheater and the audience seems remote. I suppose in the theater all of this material was done with a spotlight on an empty stage?

The Von Trapp kids no longer irk me as much as they once did; the story's key for family harmony is that everyone is simply congenial and happy at all times, and all of life should be a group activity. I've visited families that have tried to enforce those rules, and have yet to see it work. Maria's success with the Von Trapp kids and their father comes from her being able to do all the 'worldly' things frowned upon in the Abbey -- make noise, dance, sing -- proving that she really doesn't belong in the spiritual life. It is indeed weird to see the Nuns watching enraptured as Maria marries Chris Plummer instead of Christ. No matter how one dresses it up, their reaction reads as envy. Maria has achieved something they cannot.

Maria has no acknowleged selfish motives, even though everything she does magically results in a personal bourgeois victory for which any local fraülein would happily sell her soul. She basically moves in on the Captain's household like the goddess of music and harmony. The confused novice nun bit makes her impervious to accusations of widower-wooing. Yes, she does retreat before the Baroness, but those wily matchmakers back at the Abbey send her out once more. Score one for the sisterhood. Once again, Maria's wedding is a really confusing moment. The movie has kept base marital issues like sex far out of our minds, and now Maria is jumping into married life while still holding onto some notion of ultra-purity.

The threat of Naziism enters via a couple of telegrams, the snub of a local fascist leader and the overnight transformation of Liesl's boyfriend Rolfe (Daniel Truhitte) from cute messenger to Hitler youth. The Captain challenges Rolfe and scores a major moral victory (over a 17 year-old kid!). The Sound of Music allows this concerned father to flee with his entire family without harming anyone (a point is made that the servants must be given plausible deniability about the escape) or dirtying their hands. The story isn't about moral compromise but it does trivialize its Nazi-era background fairly severely. I doubt that many European refugees were able to pack alpine bags and sing their way to freedom along sunny mountain trails. Then again, I wasn't there. I understand that the actual facts about the real Von Trapps were not as unambiguously clean-cut as seen here.

The music of The Sound of Music is definitely superior, with some of Rodgers & Hammerstein's most inspirational tunes - even if Climb Every Mountain sounds as if the Mother Abbess is suggesting an escape route. Ernest Lehman has done a good job re-plastering the stage story, even though the visual crutch of the scenery overpowers any particular story detail. After many theater critics had taken the play to task for being too treacly, Lehman changed the reason for the breakup between the Baroness and the Captain. In the play both she and Max Detwieler (Richard Haydn in the movie) favored the Nazi cause, forcing the Captain to choose against them. In the movie, the love triangle remains just about love and almost all of the supporting characters are fervent anti-Nazis. Lehman thought the stage construction was too much like a history lesson, and the truth is that downplaying the Nazi issue was probably a sound commercial decision.

Fox's hefty 40th anniversary edition of The Sound of Music is quite a beautiful transfer still marred here and there by a small vertical scratches. Overall it looks lovely, with terrific detail and a bright DD 5.1 soundtrack in English and alternate tracks in Spanish and French. (Savant hasn't seen earlier DVDs or laserdiscs since 1990 or so.) The set packs a ton of extra into two discs. See the full list below. Savant sampled most of them. The long-form docu hosted by Ms. Andrews has a lot of 'fond memories' wistfulness but delivers the goods as well. The Von Trapps are covered, along with the German movie that was the inspiration for the original musical play. We even see a few snippets of a TV parody of the stage play starring Andrews and Carol Burnett -- long before the movie.

Plummer and Andrews get together for a 'reminiscence' and share a few choice memories and kid-safe anecdotes. Charmian Carr takes us on a video tour of Alpine locations, also handled as a 'personal reminiscence' -- everybody on this set behaves as if the movie were the greatest cultural event in history ... well, for 1965 it practically was. Another featurette becomes a reunion of Von Trapp kids, many of whom are grandparents now. Heather Menzies and Angela Cartwright run a production company together.

Moving along ... a 'singalong' feature covers the Hollywood Bowl's Sound of Music Sing-Along-Night. A Biography episode uncovers the true story of the real Von Trapps, who are barely recognizable from the movie version (this is very good). Mia Farrow does a singing screen test (not so good) and then does a couple of dance steps. There's also a restoration comparison and galleries of advertising print and film, and behind-the-scenes stills.

The main feature has two commentaries, one by the late Robert Wise and one with Andrews, Plummer and various others. A Karaoke feature accompanies the songs with animated sing-along words.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Sound of Music rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (Dolby Digital 4.0), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Spanish (Dolby Digital 1.0)
Supplements: Commentary by: director Robert Wise, Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer; Introduction by Julie Andrews; Isolated score; Separate chapter list for songs only with Play All feature; English, French, and Spanish sing-a-long subtitles; A Few of My Favorite Things retrospective documentary; On location with The Sound of Music; From Liesl to Gretl: A 40th Anniversary Reunion; When You Know the Notes to Sing: A Sing-Along Phenomenon. Storyboard gallery, Behind-the-scenes, Lobby cards and one-sheets; Screen tests: Mia Farrow, Marni Nixon; Trailers and TV spots: Theatrical teaser, Theatrical trailer, 1st Anniversary trailer, Academy Award trailer, 1973 reissue trailer, testimonial trailer, TV trailer
Packaging: two discs in normal Keep case
Reviewed: November 18, 2005