The Sound of Music
(1965)

Country: USA

Genre: Drama, Musical

Synopsis

Free-spirited young novice Maria (Julie Andrews) leaves the Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg, Austria to become governess to the seven children of Navy captain and widower Georg von Trapp. Captain Trapp runs his household on the basis of strict military discipline and the resentful children have managed to see off a series of governesses. However, Maria's kindness, understanding and sense of fun soon draws them to her and brings some much-needed joy into all their lives - including the Captain's, who ends up marrying her. Following the Anschluss, the Captain finds that he must report to a German Naval base to accept a commission in the German Navy. Believing in the old Austria, and strongly opposed to the Nazis, he is unprepared to work for the new regime, and so he uses his family's participation in the Salzburg Festival as a means of giving the Nazis the slip and taking his family to safety in Switzerland.

Notes

• Adapted from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical of the same name, which was in turn based on the 1949 memoir "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers" by Maria von Trapp (1905-1987). The stage musical came about after American stage director Vincent J. Donehue saw the 1956 West German film "Die Trapp-Familie", and its 1958 sequel "Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika", and thought that the story of the von Trapps would be perfect material for his friend, the actress Mary Martin, who was the first actress to be cast as Maria in the stage production. Both the film and the stage musical take very considerable liberties with the actual events they portray (for example, in actual fact the family did not escape the Nazis by hiking over the Alps, but simply by boarding a train to Italy, and travelling from thence to London). The stage musical was to be Rodgers and Hammerstein's last work together (Hammerstein died in 1960), 'Edelweiss' being the last song that the duo wrote together. The subsequent film was the most financially successful film adaptation of a Broadway musical ever made.
• In 2001, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".