The Sound Of Music

Classic 1960s musical starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Former nun Maria (Andrews) becomes the governess for a family of seven children who live in the shadow of their domineering and repressed widower father Captain Von Trapp (Plummer). Along with the required discipline Maria brings love, music and excitement into the children’s lives and also eventually begins to have an effect on their father. But just when things are looking up, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the coming war darkens all their futures. The cast also includes Charmian Carr, Nicholas Hammond and Eleanor Parker.
Some people may sneer at this 1965 musical, but the truth is the film has earned its status as a perennially watchable romantic-drama, largely on the strength of a fun story and chemistry between stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Veteran filmmaker Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still) mostly stays out of the way of the film’s appealing elements, which include a based-on-fact tale of Austria’s von Trapp family, who fled their Nazi-occupied country in 1938. Andrews is delightful and even fascinating as Maria, who sheds her tomboyish ways as a novice nun to accept the mantle of adulthood, becoming matron of the motherless von Trapp clan. Plummer is matinee-idol handsome and gives a smart performance to boot, and the cast of young people and kids who make up the singing von Trapp children make a strong impression. Based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, the score includes such winners as “Maria” and the future John Coltrane hit “My Favourite Things.”