No, think of the Austrians, cries the film, they may have cooperated with the Nazis, but some of them were sad about it! Given the prominent return to relevance of fascism in the U.S. But a principled stand is not enough to make Captain Von Trapp the hero that the film needs him to be he is presented as a stand-in for all of Austria, proudly clinging to its cultural roots as he does when he sings “Edelweiss” before the Nazis at the climactic music festival, leading the audience to imagine that Austria is just as persecuted as any of the other nations and ethnic groups that the Nazis systematically sequestered and/or murdered - Jews are, conspicuously, not spoken of a single time. The depiction of the Nazis vis-à-vis the Austrians is one of this movie’s biggest problems: Captain Von Trapp (a very dashing Christopher Plummer) refuses to display the Nazi flag at his giant house, and we also see him leave said house and homeland behind in order to avoid working for the Third Reich. We don’t have to make this a parenting discussion (I’d prefer we don’t!) but I do think she’s old enough to know some of these things and better to be unsettled sooner rather than later.Īgreed, and I found myself thinking now and then about what I hoped this movie might impart, and what would require followup discussions with us. Because she wants to be a princess and a queen, and she has Jewish heritage, and she fantasizes about marrying her female best friend. ![]() I think not just that - she’s realizing (because I am telling her) that the atrocious things could be done to her. At five years old, she is discovering that people do atrocious things sometimes and she is profoundly unsettled! In retrospect, for reasons we’ll get into, that actually seems pretty understandable to me, what with her recent discovery that Henry VIII of England was known for beheading his wives when they did stuff he didn’t like. Two parts ended up being three, in the end, because she sort of lost her mind when the Nazis arrived and could neither sit still nor shush during the dialogue-heavy scenes that kind of needed to be heard in order to follow what was going on in the third act. And I never would have picked it as our next blog, quite frankly! But our daughter had been listening to the songs with her babysitter, and she begged us for about a week to let her watch it, and we agreed to split it into two parts and watch it over the holiday weekend. So the weight of the canon isn’t really there. While I’m totally down to put genre films in the canon (I mentioned Lord of the Rings previously), and there are musicals that I really like ( Sweeney Todd and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut come to mind), it’s not my go-to genre and it’s a historically underrepresented in the canon. Sound of Music is, to a certain generation, among the great movie musicals. Second, Citizen Kane is reputed to be one of the great films- qua-films, and while that is totally a genre, it’s a genre defined by canonical weight. So I absorbed a lot about the film over the years. And I was in music school, and I feel like half the soundtrack of The Sound of Music I had to sight-read at one time or another. I mean, I have been to Salzburg and seen all the touristy hype shit there, and then we went to college only a few miles from the Trapp Family resort in Stowe Vermont and people talked about that. First, I had a very good idea of what I was in for. No, this was not like Citizen Kane to me, for a couple of reasons. ![]() I guess I should also say, I never really liked Rodgers and Hammerstein, and I tend to think most musical theater is a good 90 minutes too long. I understood it to be considered one of the great musicals of all time - along with Singin’ in the Rain, which I also have not seen. Many of my friends as a kid had it on VHS. I’ve just never been motivated to see it, though I always assumed I would. I was genuinely shocked when you said you hadn’t seen it, but then again, I only assumed you had because I think it was in fact you who first introduced our daughter to “Do-Re-Mi,” which she has known by heart for a couple of years now! Was there ever a time when you remember being like “oh yeah, nah, I don’t need to see that”? Or did it just genuinely pass you by? Were you imagining that it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype, à la Citizen Kane? You’ve heard the songs, you’ve gotten them stuck in your head, you’ve probably seen incredibly recent parodies of some of them, and you’ve gone “oh yeah, that song.” And it’s hard to overstate how great Julie Andrews is in this movie as Maria she’s in almost every shot with a bowl cut and mostly bad clothes, and she’s radiant. ![]() Spouse: Here comes our first whole-family movie criticism collaborative! The Sound of Music is in some ways so ubiquitous that it’s almost possible to go through life thinking you’ve seen it when you haven’t.
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