#40 - The Sound of Music

A movie that has truly stood the test of time. First produced in 1965, "The Sound of Music" can be seen twice a year on television, around Christmas and Easter. This kind of constant attention is unparalleled--even the most popular movie ever made, "Gone with the Wind," isn't shown on television twice a year, every year, at the same time of year.

Perhaps the reason the three-hour-long movie musical is so popular and deserves such attention is its overwhelming sense of joy in life. When it comes right down to it, people don't want to see the struggles of Scarlett O'Hara or the death of Vito Corleone every year around the happiest times of the year. They want to see Maria von Trapp run on a hill, singing falsetto about trees, hills, and music.

What follows after that opening scene is the story we all know: woman sent from convent to militaristic widow with seven children, she teaches them all to sing and enjoy life, nuns, Nazis, and romance soon follow.

The songs have become classics in their own right. Everyone, young and old, men and women, knows at least one line from one of the songs. It's impossible not to, even if you are a car mechanic living in the secluded foothills of the Appalachians: at some point or other you have heard the tune of or seen the part of the movie in which Maria calms the children's nerves with "My Favorite Things."

The story is also intoxicating. It has something for everyone: romance, betrayal, forebodings of war, and nuns.

The scene that makes me laugh the most will always be near the very end. With two minutes left in the movie, they still find a way to squeeze in some good-hearted humor. The Nazis are chasing the Von Trapps, and they get in their cars to peel out of the convent. But their engines stall. Cut to a couple of nuns standing with the Reverend Mother, saying they had sinned. They then hold up a couple of car parts that were obviously essentially to the cars' starting, and the scene fades out. Classic, harmless, clean good fun.

All of this coming together--the infectious music, the universal story, the saccharine comedy--makes one of the best feel-good movie experiences American film has ever put forth.