GROSS/56 1965 - The Sound of Music and liberal distaste
In which I get a bit worked up trying to explain why it's actually okay to like this ridiculous film.
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THE SOUND OF MUSIC: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer; directed and produced by Robert Wise. 174 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd, Metacritic.
For elite film critics in the 1960s, hating on The Sound of Music was the equivalent of putting a Ukraine flag in your X bio today. Get over it. It’s okay to love The Sound of Music.
Few films have been more commercially successful or more brutally derided than The Sound of Music. The top-grossing Hollywood movie of 1965 quickly became the most successful film ever (until The Godfather). Ten Oscar nominations, five wins. It’s a whale, unassailable. But the elite critics hated it. And there was a consensus. All had roughly the same opinion of this movie. It made them all nauseous. And it’s not difficult to understand. What they couldn’t stomach was the placing together, in an entertainment, of the Nazis and the singing nuns.
Harsh
Hold on while I fillet some of my favourite reviews for you (you’ll find plenty more of this kind of stuff if you search the archives): Joan Didion, for Vogue, wrote that it was:
“…more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people… Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.”
You should read the whole of David Thomson’s entry on the film from Have You Seen… He objects to:
“…its very pretty view of the Second World War as just a young nun, some sweet children, and the coming of the Nazis.”
Pauline Kael, pitbull in chief, really did not hold back:
“We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.”
This three-hour, widescreen monster, a love story about a lapsed nun and the family of singing aristocrats she marries into, sold a gazillion tickets. It made so much money it rescued Fox (again). By Labor Day 1969 it had made $135M (well over a billion dollars in 2025 money) and was withdrawn from screens in the USA - but only so that it could be re-released every year until Jaws or Star Wars or one of the other great paradigm-adjustments. If you search the business press you’ll find regular vignettes like this one, in the clipped language of the New York Times wire service, from December 1969:
20th Century-Fox chmn D C Stanfill tells members of NY Soc of Security Analysts that co paid about $30-million of its long-term debt in current qr; Fox pres G Stulberg, replying to question, says co will re-issue film The Sound of Music.
Not a single grown-up critic had any time at all for The Sound of Music. What upset them all was that the movie seems to make light of the Nazi annexation of Austria, treats it as no more than an inconvenience for the singing Von Trapp family, with Nazi villainy reduced to some sneering bureaucrats in big black cars; that it flatters the Austrian aristocrats rather than acknowledging the extent of their complicity in Hitler’s cruelty (it’s thought that two thirds of Austrians supported the annexation; among the aristocrats it was probably more). For Kael and Didion and Thomson - avatars for a certain kind of urbane cultural criticism (Vogue, The New Yorker, The New Republic…) - it would be essentially impossible to find anything good in The Sound of Music. It would - without wishing to overstate this - be a kind of complicity to do so.
History
The closest the film itself gets to saying anything explicit about the history is three or four lines of - I don’t really know what to call it - is it antique, anti-Prussian nationalism? Or a tougher anti-Nazi radicalism? Captain Von Trapp’s opposition to the Anschluss is conveniently vague. Is he nostalgic for Hapsburg Austria-Hungary or is he a modern nationalist asserting Austria’s sovereignty? Maybe he’s an anti-fascist? It’s impossible to know. As it becomes obvious that the Nazis are about to have their way in Austria, Christopher Plummer, as Captain Von Trapp, does a very unattractive passive-aggressive thing with his mouth (although nothing could be as bad as his fantastically awkward miming) and says things like: “Herr Zeller, some of us prefer Austrian voices raised in song to ugly German threats.” That’s essentially all we get.
Obviously The Sound of Music doesn’t offer a sophisticated analysis of the geopolitics of the period - the Von Trapps don’t ask us to consider causes or contributing factors. Neither do we learn anything of Austria’s Jews. The country’s population of about 200,000, sheltered nominally from persecution and murder by Austria’s independence, was immediately thrown into the maw of the holocaust at the annexation. None of this comes up in The Sound of Music, not a single mention.
So what’s my problem? What could possibly be wrong with this sensitive, liberal disdain for The Sound of Music? Isn’t this essentially the only decent response to a film like this, a film so wedded to its deceptions and mitigations? Well, no. To put it directly, what the critics are asking us to accept here is a version of the history which is really just as simple as the dumb Hollywood version. Didion, Kael et al want us to accept a view of the Anschluss as a uniquely and exclusively German wickedness imposed by the Nazis, out of a clear blue sky, on the people of Austria. The critics ask us, in their disgust at the filmmakers’ caricature of Austria’s capitulation, to accept another caricature: the essentially one-dimensional, comicbook Nazis of Hollywood and the pulp novels and - most important - they’re asking us to ignore all of the complicating factors - the strategic and moral abdication of the great powers, for instance; wringing their hands and happy, in this moment, to hope against hope that the absorption of Austria by Nazi Germany is really just a kind of tidying up operation: putting all the Germans neatly together, as if that couldn’t possibly do any harm. As if the chain of events triggered by the annexation wasn’t going to bring down the catastrophe of total war.
Lofty
The perspective of these clever critics is the same lofty Atlanticism that has, across the decades, always carefully removed the allied powers - the Western states - from any blame for the various European catastrophes, airbrushed their pragmatism and contingency and corruptibility. In fact - it took me a while to realise this - our critics’ perspective on the Anschluss is essentially that of contemporary liberal commentators on the Ukraine war: there is only one villain; to say otherwise is to appease the aggressor; the history and geopolitical context is irrelevant; anyone who says that culpability is shared or diffuse is obviously a bad-faith puppet. And so on and so on.
I love all three of these critics. I couldn’t possibly hold their incoherent stance on the singing nuns against them. Didion’s capsule review is achingly good and has already given me one of those tight resentment headaches (I’ve put the whole review at the bottom). Kael’s irrascibility and impatience - her occasional intemperance that can still shock today - is what we’re here for, right? I still look her up for every movie reviewed here. Thomson, who is still with us and still productive, is my number one authority, as you’ll know if you’ve read any of these reviews at all.
Wars
And I do understand their dilemma. For Didion and Kael especially, writing in the mid-sixties, amid wall-to-wall cold war crises and cultural causes célèbres, it must have seemed there was no option. A perspective on the Anschluss, an event from almost thirty years before (from as long ago as the Spice Girls and Clinton’s impeachment for us) - in a movie review for a mainstream publication - that carefully acknowledged the failure of the major powers to prevent it would have bounced around awkwardly in that Vietnam moment. Didion and Kael were both writing their reviews of The Sound of Music in the weeks after the Da Nang landings - the American chapter of the Vietnam war was just beginning. Another disaster with many fathers.
A perspective on The Sound of Music that actually tried to acknowledge the complexity of the build-up to war would have had to take in the grim pragmatism of Stalin and Roosevelt; the pathetic self-deceptions of Great Britain and France; the history of bad faith and failed treaties and all the self-serving ways that the German and Austrian elites enabled Hitler - alongside the much simpler, more comprehensible wickedness of the man himself and his ghastly Austrian collaborators - in big black cars. There’s no version of The Sound of Music that could ever have achieved this. Its schmaltzy, high-camp stylings could never have been adjusted to provide a truthful account of the build-up to the Anschluss or of the catastrophe that was about to befall Europe. How could it? Why would it?
Chill
So what I’m doing here, sixty years on from its release, is letting you off the hook. Not liking The Sound of Music because it somehow understates the cruelty of the Nazis is not a necessary - or even valid - position. You may find blue-eyed kids in lederhosen singing fake folk songs cheesy or even distasteful but that’s, precisely, a matter of taste. There’s also something distasteful about leaving out or even deleting the ugly pragmatism of the allied powers in this moment; about simplifying and minimising the hubris that, it can’t be argued, contributed to the final catastrophe. Criticising The Sound of Music, the only Hollywood film about the Anschluss, for minimising one wickedness can only leave another undescribed, unconsidered.
Here’s David Thomson on The Sound of Music, from his Have you Seen..? which I quote here all the time:
For years, in the summertime, when newspapers had nothing to write about, they might cobble up stories about how many times a serial killer in Duluth had seen The Sound of Music. No, I’m kidding you, it was never a serial killer, though here and now I would like to propose a movie—it could be called My Favorite Things—in which some provincial woman has just two things in her life: seeing The Sound of Music, and killing off elderly patients in the nursing home where she works. I see it as a vehicle for Reese Witherspoon (the wonderful shocker from Freeway, but still capable of going blonde and pink when she’s comforting the frail before she kills them). She is, of course, a mistress of trivia on the great show and film, and she has a way of singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” under her breath as she smothers her patients.
Yes, you’re right: I am a very sick, vicious old man, but writing a thousand of these little recommendations can drive you crazy, especially when I come to a picture that I loathe but which—unquestionably—has to be in the book, if only because millions of the stupid and aggrieved will write in to the publisher, “Where was The Sound of Music?” if it is not. It is here.
I can believe that coach parties of out-of-towners kept The Sound of Music going for 1,443 performances after its Broadway opening in 1959—that, and its very pretty view of the Second World War as just a young nun, some sweet children, and the coming of the Nazis. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein, their last work together, with a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse derived from a work named The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Some names fit.
Onstage, Mary Martin had played Maria at the age of forty-five—which rather shows how close the delight in musicals is to spiritual or irrational experience. The movie was the second collaboration of producer-director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman—they had killed West Side Story a few years earlier, which was a more serious crime than making The Sound of Music, because the latter had always been brain-dead. There is that opening shot, with the camera hurtling in toward the outspread arms of Julie Andrews. But instead of a messy collision, her young plum voice breaks out in “The hills are alive.” It goes on for 174 minutes, photography by Ted McCord, art direction by Boris Leven. Though dubbed (in “Edelweiss”), Christopher Plummer is caught between heavy boredom and the apparently serious urge to start kicking some of the children. He is having a terrible time, but somehow or other he must have signed a contract.
It won Best Picture, a second directing Oscar for Wise, and five Oscars altogether for ten nominations. In its initial rentals, it earned $72 million and took over the position of the most successful film of all time. The Godfather surpassed it in 1972—which reminds me of the proximity of this sort of rubbish and a murderous response.
And here’s Didion, from the May 1965 Vogue, in full:
The Sound of Music - “more embarrassing than most.”
It may well be impossible successfully to transfer musical comedy to the screen; the form is all artifice, all style, perilously dependent upon some distance between the audience and performance. To watch someone singing in Todd-AO closeup is obscurely demeaning, like being trapped on a dance floor and crooned at by a drunk. Even the kind of production musicals get is somehow insulting. “Think you can get me with some fat Technicolor chrysanthemums, just think again,” one thinks like a belligerent child, or, “Take back your Alps.” South Pacific, The King and I, West Side Story: They have all been a little embarrassing, but perhaps The Sound of Music is more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people like Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.
Are there any other Hollywood movies about the Anschluss? Leave a comment (anyone can do so - you don’t need to be a subscriber).
It’s claimed that both Pauline Kael and Joan Didion lost their jobs because of their harsh reviews of The Sound of Music - but, to be honest, the evidence seems thin.
Across its history someone or something always seems to be saving Fox - in the 1930s it was Shirley Temple. Earlier in the 1960s, after Cleopatra, it was Darryl F. Zanuck. In the 1980s it was Die Hard and then in 2017, in a kind of sad and final way, it was Disney. Brian Hannan, who is a box office analyst and a film fan, keeps a fascinating blog about this period. He’s written a really fascinating three-part post about the studios’ financial difficulties in the sixties.
The Sound of Music is based on a true story. But, as you’ve already guessed, it’s a substantially less dramatic one than the one that made it to the screen. For instance, the family fled Austria long before the Anschluss and, comfortably, by train to Italy, not over the mountains to Switzerland. A film of that story would not have been half as nauseating for the liberal critics.
My post about film books and film writing includes Kael and Thomson, natch, but not Didion - I’ve only just learnt she was a film critic.
Žižek also wants to invert the standard reading of The Sound of Music but, for him, the film is anti-semitic: the Austrians are the stolid, small-town fascists and the Nazis are the cosmopolitan Jews.
Incidentally, I also write poetry, and I just found a few copies of my pamphlet Royal in a cupboard. If you’d like one, leave a comment or email me your postal address and I’ll send you one. No charge.