As anyone who watched the Oscars telecast now knows, The Sound of Music – the much-loved film adaptation of the iconic story of an nun-turned-governess who falls in love with a retired Austrian sea captain and, as the shadow of war falls across Europe, flees with new new family to America – has just turned 50.
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The film remains one of the most successful Broadway-to-Hollywood transfers, despite playing fast and loose with the facts as recorded in The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, the 1949 memoir of Maria von Trapp.
In truth, Maria and Georg were married long before the second world war, the captain's eldest child was not Liesl – of "I'm 16 and I don't need a governess" fame – but rather a boy named Rupert, who was almost 30 at the time of the film's setting, and when the family fled they did not Climb Ev'ry Mountain but rather took a train.
And yet the 1965 film's version of the story of Maria and her family cast a unique and powerful spell that still binds it, and them, to us.
Maria's book was adapted into two German films, Die Trapp-Familie (The Trapp Family) in 1956 and Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (The Trapp Family in America) in 1958. It was also adapted into an award-winning stage musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
But it was the film musical, which starred Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, that cemented the story's prominence in modern popular culture. The most recent measure of its enduring power was Lady Gaga's show-stopping performance of the show's songs at the Academy Awards.
When it premiered on March 2, 1965, The Sound of Music was, in truth, a more modest film than historical prominence has made it. It cost $US8 million, a figure that 20th Century Fox, at the time crippled by the financial cost of Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, has reaped back a hundredfold with video and DVD sales.
Maria von Trapp – born Maria Augusta Kutschera – had sold the film rights to her book for a scant $US9000, a flat fee from which she and her heirs derived no royalties. The US film rights were sold to Paramount, who sold them on to the show's Broadway producers. Fox then bought the rights for $US1.25 million.
Closing that deal set the stage for one of the most successful films of all time, though it was not always certain to be so.
A powerful demonstration of the delicate game of dominos involved in the production of a film saw Bing Crosby, Yul Brynner and Walter Matthau all in line to play Captain Georg von Trapp. And Anne Bancroft, Doris Day and Leslie Caron were all in line for the role of Maria. Among the actors who tested for roles as the children: Teri Garr, Mia Farrow, Patty Duke, Lesley-Anne Down and Kurt Russell.
Those names seem ludicrous now to an audience that grew up watching Plummer and Andrews. Not to mention the sublimely stylish Eleanor Parker as Maria's romantic rival, Baroness Schraeder, and the divine Peggy Wood as the Mother Abbess.
And those children, heaven bless them: Charmian Carr as Liesl, Nicholas Hammond as Friedrich, Heather Menzies as Louisa, Duane Chase as Kurt, Angela Cartwright as Brigitta, Debbie Turner as Marta and Kym Karath as Gretl.
Yet when it premiered, the critics were less than kind.
"The septet of blond and beaming youngsters who have to act like so many Shirley Temples and Freddie Bartholomews when they were young do as well as could be expected with their assortedly artificial roles, but the adults are fairly horrendous, especially Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp," declared The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther.
Crowther was kind to Andrews, but brutal to the rest of the cast: Richard Haydn he called "conventionally histrionic", Eleanor Parker he described as "highly enamelled and just as brittle" and of Peggy Wood, he noted that she "blessedly [turned] away from the camera when somebody with a much younger voice, maybe Marni Nixon, sings Climb Ev'ry Mountain for her".
"Even though a couple of new songs have been added (both forgettable), [director Robert Wise] seems to run out of songs toward the end of the picture and repeat two or three of the more familiar ones. But the same must be said of The Sound of Music. It repeats, in style, and in theme," he finished.
The film, of course, went on to become one of the most successful of all time. Its initial box office was an astonishing $US286 million, excluding its rich second life on video and on DVD (not to mention royalties from those Sing-a-long-a screenings). Adjusted for inflation and based on original box office alone it ranks as the most successful film musical of all time, and the third most successful film of any kind, behind only Gone with the Wind and Star Wars.
