The Sound of Music is a 1965 American musical drama film produced and directed by Robert Wise from a screenplay written by Ernest Lehman, and starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, with Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, and Eleanor Parker. The film is an adaptation of the 1959 stage musical, composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a book by Lindsay and Crouse. Based on the 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp, the film is set in Salzburg, Austria and is a fictional retelling of her experiences as governess to seven children, her eventual marriage with their father Captain Georg Von Trapp, and their escape during the Anschluss in 1938.[4]
The Sound of Music received five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, Wise's second pair of both awards, the first being from the 1961 film West Side Story.[5] The film also received two Golden Globe Awards, for Best Motion Picture and Best Actress, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Musical. In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) listed The Sound of Music as the fifty-fifth greatest American film of all time, and the fourth-greatest film musical. In 2001, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The Sound of Music story is based on Maria von Trapp's memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, published in 1949 to help promote her family's singing group following the death of her husband Georg in 1947.[8] Hollywood producers expressed interest in purchasing the title only, but Maria refused, wanting her entire story to be told.[8] In 1956, German producer Wolfgang Liebeneiner purchased the film rights for $9,000 (equivalent to $97,000 in 2022), hired George Hurdalek and Herbert Reinecker to write the screenplay, and Franz Grothe to supervise the soundtrack, which consisted of traditional Austrian folk songs.[9] The Trapp Family was released in West Germany on October 9, 1956, and became a major success.[8] Two years later, Liebeneiner directed a sequel, The Trapp Family in America, and the two pictures became the most successful films in West Germany during the post-war years.[8] Their popularity extended throughout Europe and South America.[8]
In December 1962, 20th Century-Fox president Richard D. Zanuck hired Ernest Lehman to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of the stage musical.[13] Lehman reviewed the original script for the stage musical, rearranged the sequence of songs, and began transforming a work designed for the stage into a film that could use the camera to emphasize action and mood and open the story up to the beautiful locations of Salzburg and the Austrian Alps.[14] The "Do-Re-Mi" sequence in the play, for example, was originally a stagnant number; Lehman transformed it into a lively montage showing some of the beautiful sites of Salzburg, as well as showing Maria and the children growing closer over time.[14] Lehman also eliminated two songs, "How Can Love Survive?" and "No Way to Stop It", sung by the characters of Elsa and Max.[14] In January 1963, he saw the Fox English-dubbed version of the two German films. Not especially impressed, he decided to use the stage musical and Maria's memoir for most of his source material.[15] While Lehman was developing the screenplay, he and Zanuck began looking for a director. Their first choice was Robert Wise, with whom Lehman had worked on the film adaptation of West Side Story, but Wise was busy preparing work for another film, The Sand Pebbles.[16] Other directors were approached and turned down the offer, including Stanley Donen, Vincent J. Donehue, George Roy Hill, and Gene Kelly.[17]
Most of the soundtrack to The Sound of Music was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and arranged and conducted by Irwin Kostal, who also adapted the instrumental underscore passages.[71][72] Both the lyrics and music for two new songs were written by Rodgers, as Hammerstein died in 1960.[73] The soundtrack album was released by RCA Victor in 1965 and is one of the most successful soundtrack albums in history, having sold over 20 million copies worldwide.[74][75]
The Sound of Music: Original Soundtrack Recording (Super Deluxe Edition) was released on 1 December 2023, compiling all of the previously released music, as well as the complete instrumental score, demo versions, songs with alternate scoring (i.e. solely instrumental), and interviews with Richard Rodgers, Robert Wise and Charmian Carr.[84]
Wise hired Mike Kaplan to direct the publicity campaign for the film.[85] After reading the script, Kaplan decided on the ad line "The Happiest Sound in All the World", which would appear on promotional material and artwork.[85] Kaplan also brought in outside agencies to work with the studio's advertising department to develop the promotional artwork, eventually selecting a painting by Howard Terpning of Andrews on an alpine meadow with her carpetbag and guitar case in hand with the children and Plummer in the background.[86][87][Note 4] In February 1964, Kaplan began placing ads in the trade papers Daily Variety, Weekly Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter to attract future exhibitor interest in the project.[85] The studio intended the film to have an initial roadshow theatrical release in select large cities in theaters that could accommodate the 70-mm screenings and six-track stereophonic sound.[88] The roadshow concept involved two showings a day with reserved seating and an intermission similar to Broadway musicals.[88] Kaplan identified forty key cities that would likely be included in the roadshow release and developed a promotional strategy targeting the major newspapers of those cities.[86] During the Salzburg production phase, 20th Century-Fox organized press junkets for American journalists to interview Wise and his team and the cast members.[86]
The film had its opening premiere on March 2, 1965, at the Rivoli Theater in New York City.[90][91] Initial reviews were mixed.[92] Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times, criticized the film's "romantic nonsense and sentiment", the children's "artificial roles", and Robert Wise's "cosy-cum-corny" direction.[93] Judith Crist, in a biting review in the New York Herald Tribune, dismissed the movie as "icky sticky" and designed for "the five to seven set and their mommies".[90] In her review for McCall's magazine, Pauline Kael called the film "the sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat", and that audiences have "turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs."[94][Note 5] Wise later recalled, "The East Coast, intellectual papers and magazines destroyed us, but the local papers and the trades gave us great reviews".[88] Indeed, reviewers such as Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "three hours of visual and vocal brilliance",[88] and Variety called it "a warmly-pulsating, captivating drama set to the most imaginative use of the lilting R-H tunes, magnificently mounted and with a brilliant cast".[88] The "wildly mixed film reviews" reflected the critical response to the stage musical, according to The Oxford Companion to the American Musical.[96] After its Los Angeles premiere on March 10, The Sound of Music opened in 131 theaters in the United States, including a limited number of roadshow events.[88] After four weeks, the film became the number one box office movie in the country and held that position for thirty out of the next forty-three weeks in 1965.[97] The original theatrical release of the film in America lasted four and a half years.[97]
A few months after its United States release, The Sound of Music opened in 261 theaters in other countries, the first American movie to be completely dubbed in a foreign language, both dialogue, and music.[98] The German, French, Italian, and Spanish versions were completely dubbed, the Japanese version had Japanese dialogue with English songs, and other versions were released with foreign subtitles. The film was a popular success in every country it opened, except the two countries where the story originated, Austria and Germany.[99]
The Sound of Music film adaptation, like the stage musical, presents a history of the von Trapp family (a.k.a. the Trapp Family) that is not completely accurate. The musical was based on the West German film The Trapp Family (1956) rather than Maria von Trapp's 1949 memoirs, as director Vincent J. Donehue had seen the film and decided that it would make a good vehicle for Mary Martin.[148] The musical followed the film's plot so closely that the New York Times review of the West German film noticed that it "strongly suggests 'The Sound of Music,' often scene by scene."[Note 8][149] The West German screenwriters made several significant changes to the family's story that were kept in the musical. Maria had been hired to teach just one child, but the 1956 film made her governess to all seven children.[150]
The 1965 film adaptation was influenced by other musicals of its era, such as Mary Poppins, the Rodgers and Hammerstein television production of Cinderella, and the stage production of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot (coincidentally all starring Julie Andrews). Screenwriter Ernest Lehman was inspired by the opening of West Side Story and saw the musical as "a fairy tale that's almost real".[151] The film incorporated many "fairy tale" tropes which included the idyllic imagery (placed in the hills of Salzburg), the European villas, and the cross-class Cinderella-like romance between Maria and Captain Von Trapp. As Maria walks down the aisle to be married, the pageantry is explicitly both Guinevere and Cinderella.[152]
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