The Hills were alive – as was the theatrical movie business – when The Sound of Music filled cinemas starting on March 2, 1965.
Sixty years ago, big budget musicals were a risky business. Though this didn’t deter 20th Century Fox, which chose to mount a filmed production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1959 Tony Award-winning Broadway stage success.
The payoff: as a feature film, The Sound of Music became a Best Picture Oscar winner and surpassed Gone With the Wind as the biggest grossing movie of all time.
It seems crazy now but the biggest gamble of them all may have been casting Julie Andrews in the lead. She was screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s first choice to play the central role of Maria, a young Austrian woman who ditches the nunnery to twirl in the Alps and become governess to seven singing children. Her charges were all sired by widower Captain von Trapp (Canadian Christopher Plummer), an aristocrat who dumps his Baroness girlfriend (Eleanor Parker), marries Maria and, before you can sing, “Do-Re-Mi,” they scale a mountain and evade Nazi capture.
Andrews, of course, seems such an obvious choice now. The 1965 film was influenced by other hit musicals of that era, including Mary Poppins (1964), the 1957 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and Lerner and Loewe’s 1960 Broadway hit Camelot – all of which starred Andrews.
The British actress, however, was signed to The Sound of Music before Mary Poppins was released. Plus, she had already been passed over for the lead of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, despite originating the role on Broadway, because studio head Jack Warner felt she wasn’t a big enough movie name. (Audrey Hepburn headlined that 1964 film.)
Director Robert Wise, who had worked with Lehman on the Oscar-winning West Side Story, wanted Andrews for the lead role, although he also had Grace Kelly and Shirley Jones on his short list. He and Lehman were able to screen some of Andrews’ scenes from Mary Poppins at Disney Studios and, after a few minutes, Wise reportedly turned to Lehman and said, “Let’s go sign this girl before somebody else sees this film and grabs her!”
Christopher Plummer, meanwhile, was not the only actor considered for the role of the von Trapp patriarch. Bigger names, including Yul Brenner, Richard Burton, Bing Crosby and Sean Connery were also in contention.
Wise saw Plummer on Broadway and lobbied for the Canadian, then better known as a Shakespearean stage star. The Toronto native, however, turned down the job at first, dismissing the von Trapp role as “sentimental and gooey.” Wise lived up to his name, however, and took Plummer’s notes. As a result, the Captain gained more spine and dimension.
Plummer famously became known, in the ensuing decades, for his supposed dislike of the film and the fact that, after all of his storied performances on stage and screen, his role in The Sound of Music remained among his best-known.
Zoomer asked Plummer about the film in a 2015 cover story (around the time of the movie’s 50th anniversary), noting that most people feel like they have tip-toe around the subject with him.
“Yeah, quite right,” he laughed. “And they should. Sometimes they should tip-toe right out the friggin’ room.”
Plummer, however, praised the film as “the all-time family movie,” adding that, “It’s got everything, a wonderful score by Rogers and Hammerstein. I just didn’t think my part was very exciting. When people say, ‘You’re so wonderful in that movie,’ I want to say, ‘Oh piss off.’ They have no idea how I loathed playing that part.”
Of course, Plummer was not the only Canadian-born actor in the cast. Heather Menzies, who played Louisa, the third-oldest of the von Trapp children, was also featured, including on the singing of, So Long, Farewell and The Lonely Goatherd.
Menzies continued acting and, in 1974, married Vega$ and Spencer: For Hire star Robert Urich. Little known fact: she was from Toronto, Ont.; he hailed from Toronto, Ohio. Both are buried in Prince Edward County, Ont.
Menzies was one of over 200 child actors who auditioned for the feature. Probably the most well known was Angela Cartwright (Brigitta von Trapp), part of Danny Thomas’ sitcom family at the time.
Critics Said “So Long, Farewell”
The film, though considered a classic now, was not universally embraced by critics. Bosley Crowther at The New York Times knocked Wise’s “cosy-cum-corny” direction. Judith Crist at the New York Herald Tribune called it “icky sticky.” Pauline Kael in McCall’s dismissed it as “the sugar-coated lie people want to eat.”
And did they ever. The film was an unprecedented smash, remaining at number one at the U.S. box office for a total of 41 weeks. In Toronto, at the Eglinton Theatre, it played for 142 consecutive weeks. It was the first film to gross over $100 million.
The soundtrack, arranged by Irwin Kostal, was also an enormous hit, selling over 20 million albums worldwide. In 1965 and 1966 in the U.K., it outsold the Beatles!
When the movie finally went to television, more records were broken. Unlike today, when movies jump right to streaming services in two or three weeks, The Sound of Music didn’t appear on home screens until February of 1976. ABC paid $15 million for the rights for a single broadcast that earned an audience share of 49 per cent.
NBC later negotiated for multiple, annual airings. Heavily edited down from its original three-hour-plus running time, it became a broadcast network holiday favourite in Canada and the U.S. for decades. A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray version is set to be released later this year to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the feature.
What will be harder to recreate will be the wonder of seeing the original roadshow version of The Sound of Music. That showy, chopper-lensed opening shot of Andrews singing and twirling on the Bavarian mountain top was captured in TODD-AO on a special MCS-70 Camera.
As you looked up at the giant screen it almost made you dizzy, as did all the popcorn and candy consumed and purchased during the prolonged intermission. You and your school mates left knowing the words to many of the songs – tunes still stuck in our heads 60 years later.
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