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I read "Sound of
Music" is the
most watched movie of all time, which means it must
be
blogged. After all, the most watched move of all
time
must resonate deeply with a host of people.
Decades have passed between now
and then and I suppose my palate has been cleansed
enough of my introduction, at age eight, to
the hype of "Music". A monumental production with
pioneering aerial cinematography! Wow! But what I
recollect most is the rumor that "Sound of Music"
was to be the last of something like good, solid,
wholesome cinema, that it was the last of the
musicals--laws were to be written against them,
Julie Andrews was to be banished by Congress--and
from here on
out it would be all decadent breasts bouncing out of
Hellwood, no more family fare.
For that
reason
"The Sound of Music" was as holy as Salk and as much
a must as the polio vaccine. Gather up the Girl
Scouts
and hustle them down for an afternoon audience with
the holy mother, Andrews the new icon of
god-fearing American
entertainment, a young Saint Joan who had shorn her
hair that we might heed the great sky god who
spoke to her upon the mountain, only
the desolate she gathered in were
Kennedy's orphaned children and their
suburbia-addled mothers
whose land-locked lollipop ships were under heavy
assault by the British pop-rock invasion and its
shaggy boy beasts. And what I remember
almost as well is my mother disliked Julie Andrews,
her voice, her looks, everything about her,
and because of this and her contempt for the Julie
Andrews' hype I was unable to wholly throw myself
into
the experience of "Music" as were the rest of the
dedicates who swore loyalty to Julie and resistance
to what the Dark Powers of the World had sworn to do
to her. Women cried. Maybe it was
a Northern thing. The South had "Gone with the
Wind" and Scarlett O'Hara. The Yanks had "The Sound
of Music". One wanted the return to plantations and
the thirteen-inch waist. The other wanted to turn
the clock back before WWII and absolve the Old
World gods who had disdained crossing the Atlantic.
They were going home to pack their suitcases and
carry them across the waters before they went murderously
senile.
Fear of the death of god was an up-and-coming
concern in
suburban homes. In a few years "Life" magazine
would
headline a possible obituary. Right up there on
the endangered list with god was his compatriot
spirit, music. Atonal Shoenberg and his 12 note
serial method hadn't killed it. Safe to say that
those who feared what they sited as meaningless 60s
pop lyrics had never heard of Shoenberg. The old
standard "Yes, we have no Bananas", now that was all
right, as long as it didn't go by its original
title,
the "I've Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues".
The Old World gods they trusted to Julie
Andrews to carry over the Alps knew nothing of the
Blues.
Julie Andrews would later attempt to remind she was
an
entertainer and dissociate herself from being holy
mother of the American musical, drunkenly baring
breasts in "S.O.B".
But for now it's 1965 and as "The Sound of Music"
opens we are treated to stunning big screen
aerial shots (I recollect, watching on my 20 inch
tellie) of clouds which make me feel yes, I should
be remembering something, been here before, so
familiar,
coming in through the clouds, over the mountains,
shades of the primordial, the creation of the
world (was I there?), several years hence Kubrick
will use over hill and dale aerial cinematography to ferry us silent screaming to Jupiter and beyond but
right
now it's 1965 not 1967 and Julie Andrews' latest hit
was as the Heartland's dream governess in "Mary
Poppins", which also opened with clouds, Julie taking a cumulous cab...
Indeed, I have been here before!
Is that Mary Poppins' magic carpet bag in the poster
for "The Sound of Music"? Is Andrews incapable of
keeping her feet
on the ground? But no no no folks and folkies we
are not riding into dirty old London (which turned
around and shafted us with Carnaby Street).
Instead, we
descend through frigid pristine fogginess to alpine
greenery, twittering birds, violins, horns, flutes.
Our spirits should soar even as we glide to earth
and be still my heart, there she is, Julie Andrews
singing to the hills her cheery positive take on
loneliness, skipping over stones, being blessed with
the sound of music until church bells
chime and she is sent hastily, clumsily seeking her
fallen habit, flying fleet-of-foot to mass. A
veritable Diana who belongs to field and stream but
no
man.
Which is when we realize we have
stumbled
upon a novitiate whose senses still tie
to the physical world in a manner that
those who never mix peas with mashed potatoes would
have believe ill becomes the
sacred, the protestant-puritan corps d'esprit
to whom the film ironically caters though espousing
a
certain common sense acceptance of sensual joys
which
the film's Catholic nuns realize are god-given and
essential to most. That kind of world
-is-fundamentally good Sisterhood so popular in 60s
Holywood movies. There is, by the way, not a
single priest exhibited in the film. I don't know if
this is something people realize, but certainly the
subconscious takes note. The film belongs
spiritually to mother earth. Which is a why it
succeeds despite lousy politics. Had it belonged to
venerable pater it would have belonged to the
fatherland and ultimately to Hitler, and I don't
believe the film ever refers to the fatherland,
instead
only to the homeland.
Cut from Julie's spontaneity and hills of green to
stone courtyard and chapel dotted with somber women
in
black, the aged and middle-aged congregating for
chapel and worship. Order and containment. A world
into which Maria doesn't fit, the Sisterhood
admits. The absent Maria adores animals. And if one
has not found her in
the usual places one is to look for her in the
unusual. (Get it? We will not hit you over the head
with sacred allusions.) Maria is likeable and not so
likeable, loveable
and not so loveable. She is rebellious, and always
in
trouble. How do you solve a problem like
Maria?
"Who are these guys?" my seven year old asks.
During the 60s Hollywood seemed intent on priming
prepubescent females for the nunnery with a string
of popular nun films. Debbie Reynolds was "The
Singing Nun". Guitars and folk music played
prominently. Spiritual hipsters swung rosary belts. It was
Hollywood's manner of expressing the notion of 60s
musicians as priests and priestesses leading a
spiritual new wave. I would discuss this some more
but Maria--tomboyish, short-haired Maria--is
running about slamming doors and is about to be
showed the gate for the wolf pack with which she'll
be most at home.
No, no, Maria pleads that
she belongs at the convent, that she grew up on the
mountain and the mountain led her to the convent.
Something like that.
Not for a second would
anyone in the American theater buy that Julie
Andrews grew up on that Alpine mountain. Andrews
is, after all, American--oh, that's right, British,
sorry--but Americans interpret as they please and as
the movie intended, for this is not the story of
Austrian Maria Von Trapp. Andrews instead speaks to
the several generations' removed American immigrant
who carries the mountain with them over the American
prairie in their portable strudels and cuckoo
clocks. The American German-Austrian is no more
German to the Austrian-German than the low
German-German was to the Imperial Aristocratic
Hapsburg. Or oops I suppose I shouldn't go there.
Anyway, yeah, right, Maria grew up on the mountain.
In Colorado. And the Mother Superior informs her
the will of god is that she leave the convent for a
time, to learn what she really wants, which is not
what the enthusiastic Maria wants to hear, that she
is to take care of the seven children of a retired
officer of the Imperial Navy, Maria expressing the
kind of dismay one wouldn't expect of 60's Catholic
opponents of The Pill (contraception a hot subject
of debate at the time for Catholics, and see I told
you the film was aimed primarily for Protestants).
Not a good sign that the retired officer of the
Imperial Navy is unable to keep a governess but we
all already know that story and what will happen,
how Julie will win their hearts and marry the
Captain and flee with him over the mountains from
Nazi-occupied Austria to Switzerland, so obviously
we aren't at the movie to have that question
answered for us.
Why are we here?
"When the lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a
window," Maria voices the wisdom of the Mother
Superior, bolstering her confidence as she exits the
convent.
And suspension of disbelief collapses. It was
already difficult buying Julie Andrews as a wannabe
nun. It was difficult that Andrews was about 30 in
this role and if you stood her up against a
door frame the emotional maturity of the character
seemed to be about 16 years of age tall on tiptoe. One of the
more major problems was that Julie had short blond
hair and everyone knew that Mary Poppins had
brunette hair she wore back in a bun. Oh, but what
we are now forced to accept! For she is dressed in
a doudy gray ill-fitting dress of schoolgirl cut, a
rough-textured brown jacket four sizes too small,
and broad school-girlish hat brim crowning her blond
Julie brow (which was the death knell for
broad-brimmed schoolgirl hats which had been Sunday
popular beforehand). There was nothing the least
bit attractive about this Julie, nor was there
intended to be, except her brash, rash enthusiasm
and her shiny blond hair. It doesn't occur to us at first
what we have here is Julie Andrews as Charlie Chaplin.
Instead, we long to rescue our dear nanny, Mary
Poppins, from this terrible, unfortunate hazing as
she sings this is what she wanted all along but was
afraid of it, shoring up her confidence through
song as she boards her bus, is clumsily stuck on the
bus steps by her guitar as she disboards, as she
skips and whirls in a naive, supposed unfeminine
manner down the road, and I think y'know Julie
really did throw her heart into this performance and
begin to be won over as she comes up onto another
gate, her other opening door, to the Captain's
overwhelming mansion, the Leopldskron Castle where
the front exteriors were shot.
Breathless, Maria rings the bell. Just in case
one of the audience imagined her outfit was
appropriate for the culture and time, the butler's
reaction informs that just as she was ill-suited to
the convent, so she shall be ill-suited to life in
the house of a captain of the Imperial Navy.
Maria, in sackcloth, is intended to be each
female viewer: an ugly duckling, the every day
peasant girl whose exceptional individuality
attracts the prince to recognize in her heart a
royal kinship, thus transforming the atypical
talking toad into the proud beauty which she always
really was, in other words a Cinderella story, her
dead mother embodied both in the Captain's dead wife
and the compassionate Mother Superior.
Cut to castle's interior and ain't it the truth,
Maria nearly breathless at the grandeur of old
Austrian wealth. Down Cinderella steps she's drawn,
her curiosity promptly leading her through closed
doors right into Bluebeard's secret, gold-walled,
opulent closet. Bang. On the threshold he appears,
the Captain. The pretty frog meets the beautiful
beast.
"There are certain rooms not to be disturbed!" he
growls, which is of course an open invitation to
disturb, to brush away wintery ghosts with fresh
spring leaves. Hollywood expects that every female,
aged 10 to 90, has fallen at once for the gruff
Captain and having fallen they've replaced Maria
with their own face and form and will be loyal to
the end as long as Maria doesn't metamorphosis into
an ideal that would threaten to outshine them, and
as long as they get what they want, a doting prince.
Hollywood has had a love for stories of
authoritarian fathers and the Captain's character is
of the same blood line, both military and royal,
expecting royal and military discipline at all
times. When the captain blows his whistle the
children promptly marshal forth in pseudo naval
uniforms with proper bows and striping. The message
is that children kept under a tight rein shall find
freedom whatever way they can. We love authority
but hate it and rebel against it. We honor the
handsome, harsh Captain but...
Ok the kids are introducing themselves. One by one,
calling out their names. Ages 16 to 5. A point of
identification for nearly everyone. If all the
women in the audience are now Maria, nearly every
single child in the audience is now imagined in the
role of one of the Captain's children. Every single
one of the children in the audience loves it that
Fraulein rebels against whistles. Every single
one of the children in the audience imagines they
are the one who slipped the fat frog into Fraulein's
pocket because they know it's going to be ok, she
will love them regardless, so of course they put a
welcoming pinecone in her dinner seat and Julie,
cross still hanging about her neck in a loud "Not
Available" way, bringing god to the table, nimbly
contrives prayer to be followed by tears of
contrition on the part of her charges, children
fleeing in shame of their tricks. They have met
their love match and from now on out will be
capering lambs.
Thus is the power of the
Andrews-Nanny. It's a wonder that no one has
capitalized on the winning combination with a chain
of "Poppins' Au pere's".
Daddy is no doubt in love by now as well but,
unlike real life, there's a story line to be
negotiated.
Enter the villain. A young Nazi-in-training
arrives at the mansion. We recognize him as such as
he is blond and severe and all Nazi youths of this
era, in Hollywood, were blond and severe. He is
Liesl's beau and she runs through the garden of
adolescent Eden to find her Rolfe. May she be his
possible redemption? Despite their secret and supposedly forbidden love,
Rolfe boosts conformity, being careful, in
both matters political and romantic. He is the
last of the "I'll tell you want to do" Old World
men, I take it. The scene is a charming example of
contrariness, the lyrics painting Liesl as timid and
shy when she's as rarin' to go as a family film of
the time permits her to be. As they dance together
in the gazebo, Liesl running the circle of benches,
I'm reminded of the Lipizzaner stallions which were
wildly popular when they began touring in 1970, and
well known beforehand so that all horse-loving girls
who ever played horsie, galloping about their
suburban lawns, were no doubt aware Liesl was a
horse and Rolfe her ring master. Which is why I'm
reminded of the Lipizzaners. One was supposed to be
reminded. The Lipizzaners belonged to the Royal
House of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Rolfe may have a
rein on Leisl now, but the spirit of General Patton
waits in the wings to free the noble-born from the
rough commoner who would kidnap power rather than
undergo the trial of the glass slipper.
In
this film, Royals shoulder their awesome power with
a dignified sense of responsibility. The bad butler
is the commoner who wants what the Royals have and
doesn't understand his natural-born place. If
Andrews is the commoner who makes good, well, it
should be considered that she was first engaged to
god.
The Royals may serve as a metaphor for humankind's,
uh, nobler, higher self, but their joints are
creaky.
Denied the request for material with which to make
play-clothes for the children, Maria pulls a
Scarlett O'Hara and makes clothes of curtains. This
is America declaring its independence from Britain.
How do I know? Because the colonies, symbolized by
the children, all gather in Andrews' room to sing
about their favorite things, and as they all are
American (er, Austrian) then Britain must go. Except for Andrews, who is American at heart. She can stay. Skip Ellis Island, go straight to California.
Ironic foreshadowing when Maria learns the
Captain is preparing to marry, and she voices she's
been sent to prepare him for his new wife.
"That's Mary Poppins?" my son asks.
"Yes," I reply, remembering how stunned we were as
children when Poppins went from long dark hair to
short blond hair. And married...
But, oh, that Beast Von Trapp! Not only was Maria's
joyful folk music not permitted in the abbey, it is
verboten at the Captain's house.
Maria don't care. Though the Captain says no to
play-clothes she makes them anyway. A miracle, the
children are now sunny and cheerful running about
with baskets and kerchiefs through town and
countryside, following Maria with her guitar. If
the Captain says no to music, then she will raise
his imps to be minstrels. Anti-authority Maria, in
Beatnik brown and sensible flats makes yummy meat
loaf of Folk for the American audience.
Anti-authority Maria in peasant dress stands outside
the home of the Beaver Cleavers, bowl of hippy
granola in hand ("No, see, is Old World Goodness,
not unbathed hippies, yah?"), and fifes for the
children to follow her to the Alpine wilderness
(very clean, uncluttered) where they will discover
their Boy and Girl Scout natures and find that
inside every mid twentieth century American is a
little Austrian in Leder Hosen.
Julie became our music teacher. "When you know the
notes to sing, you can sing most anything!"
Do-re-mi-fa-so-la! A whole generation has Julie to
thank for knowing that tea goes with bread and
jam.
By the time the Captain returns with his baroness,
the children have become Austrian wood fairies and
elves teasing traffic. And more foreshadowing. The
outrageous Max accompanies, who is looking for new
talent for the Salzburg Folk Festival. Bob Dylan
need not apply.
A contrast is made between the glittering salons of
Vienna and the pastoral, the Baroness suggesting
the Captain prefers it in the country, may even be
poetic, may be running from memories.
"I do like rich people," Max says. "I like the way
they live. I like the way I live when I'm with
them."
The Captain discovers Rolfe tossing pebbles at
Liesl's window. Embarrassed, cowed, confused, Rolfe
sides with the only comeuppance that his witty
mind can come up with. "Heil Hitler!" he announces allegiance,
aware how it will grate the royal Captain.
"You know I have no political convictions," says Max
who loves rich people. "Can I help it if other
people do?"
"Yes!" exclaims the Captain, overcome with
consternation at the New World Order growing up around
him.
The Baroness attempting to lighten the
mood, I would like to be cynical but she is written
not to be despotic but flawed and human, and Maria
appears with the children in a boat out of which
they promptly fall, cups of excitement overflowing
at the Captain's return, welcoming the baroness, the
baroness laughing. And we all know if anything it
is Baroness Schraeder who will prepare the Captain for
his wife, for Maria, smiling graciously in her fire
engine danger red dress, discreetly removing herself
as the Captain prepares to climb all over Maria for
her permitting the children to climb trees, Maria
soaking wet nearly yelling just love them, love them
all, they want to be loved, the Sound of Music
(hark) intruding just as the Captain orders back
to the nunnery Maria who had taught the children to
sing for the Baroness Schraeder.
Cloaked in a hazy
Vaseline glow, inspired, the Captain turns out also
to be one who goes to the hills when his heart is
lonely, taking up the song. Stunned, all fall
silent. Baroness Schraeder's suspicions begin to be
confirmed that wedding bells are ringing but not for
her. Not with the Captain falling into the arms of
his children then running out to find Julie and
apologizing to her.
Man, I want to be cynical and tart about it all but
I can't be. These people are just too damned happy,
when they have been so sad.
Now the puppet theater scene where the children in
the audience feel they get a real taste of Austrian
culture. I remember that blue dress of Julie's
with the wide butterfly sleeves. I hated that dress
and was of course destined to wear one like it in a
few years. The story of the lonely goat herder is not
quite what one would expect from a novitiate, but Julie is, as she earlier announced,
preparing the Captain for his new bride. Despite
fluttering eyelashes and the sexual super and
subtext, it is a scene for the kiddies. My seven
year old rewinds and plays it over and over.
"My dear is there anything you can't do?" inquires
Schraeder of Maria in her politest kitty tone.
The citified Viennese have lost their way and haven't
the pure hearts of the country Austrian.
Maria entices the Captain to play guitar,
and he does, much to the dismay Schraeder.
"Why didn't you tell me to bring along my
harmonica?" she quips.
Clean and bright Edelweiss, blooming and growing,
bless my homeland forever. "Bless my homeland
forever," the Captain sings to Maria, his
home.
"The Von Trapp family singers," Max dubs them,
having found his new-found talent, a singing group
that will be the talk of the Salzburg Folk
Festival.
Thrilled beyond words, Baroness Schraeder announces a
need for a party.
The doors of the forbidden golden ball room flung
open, it resounds with music, people swirling in
waltzes, the elegant Baroness receiving visitors at
the Captain's side, heir apparent. But a guest is
appalled by the display of the Austrian flag in the
hallway. There will be no return to the world that
was.
Outside on the patio,
Julie teaches the children the steps of an old
Austrian (Hollywood) folk dance. This is the version of
Cinderella where she doesn't quite make it into the
ballroom, the Prince instead leaving the company of
his peers to join her. He breaks in on the dance.
They, of course, perform perfectly together, rooted in
the folk ways of their country which bind them.
She puts out her hand to follow him. Tension. The
children have disappeared. Maria and the Captain
gaze into each other's eyes. The children return.
"Your face is all red." Ah, Maria, the shame of it!
"What a lovely couple you make," the baroness
admits. Maria flees.
The children, under Maria's tutelage, sing the
cuckoo clock good night song. So long farewell. Auf
weidersehn good-bye. Max declares Maria must stay
for dinner. Baroness Schraeder at last makes the move
to protect her territory, aware it is now or never.
The blond ice queen informs Maria that she is in
love with the Captain and the Captain believes he is
in love with her, then slinks downstairs in her
sun-gold dress. (The 50s blond goddess was still
having it out with the new more natural beauty
Hollywood was swinging toward, but would soon lose
her apartment in New York and move to Green Acres.)
We have only seen Maria's bedroom twice--the night
she arrived, and now again when she leaves in a
terrified panic, taking cover in her old sackcloth.
The baroness attempts to take Maria's place with the
children. But can't play ball. "Boarding school,"
she says to Max, who wants the children to rehearse,
but the children are unable to sing without Maria.
The hills are no longer alive with the Sound of
Music. The Captain announces his intention to marry
Baroness Schraeder. As the children kiss her
reluctantly, Max and Ms. Baroness exchange glances
(he keeps her honest). Then the children go to
the abbey to look for Maria. "Our abbey is not to
be used as an escape," Maria is told by her Mother
Superior. "I can't face him again," Maria pleads.
And as my son squishes marshmallows on his face,
Mother Superior turns to sing that Maria should climb
every mountain and ford every stream, follow every
rainbow until she finds her dream, Maria standing
within a pyramid of light.
Meanwhile back at the mansion, the Captain cordially
attempts to find out why the children were late for
dinner. Maria returns but this time not in
sackcloth.
"You left without saying goodbye, even to the
children," Captain says. The screenwriters permit
Maria to return on her own rather than being
pursued. Permit the Captain to break it off with
the Baroness while permitting her also to break off in
turn, giving him leave to go to Maria, allowing
her to be a character more complex than Snow White's
evil queen mother. One senses that she did care for
the Captain who spares no time casually sauntering across the garden toward Maria who wears
again the blue dress. In the gazebo where Liesl had
danced with Rolfe, Maria sings as to how in her
wicked horrible youth she must have done something
good to deserve this. The Captain nuzzles her hair
and says he fell in love with her the moment she sat
on the pinecone. She fell in love with him first,
when he blew the whistle. There's something not
right about the scene. I've never believed either
of them. It doesn't matter. It couldn't be any other way. And that's weird.
Weddings were once really big events
in the movies. Maria released from the
near risk of the self-imposed prison of the Sisterhood, literally
advancing beyond bars into the cathedral,
approaching the Captain in a display of virginal
white that seems intended to break the Hollywood
wedding bank, the last of the capital M movie marriages, makes for
an oddly anti-climactic moment, peculiar in its brevity.
Unattended, Maria gives herself away, which creates a sense of
markedly different. The guests are the world for whom the principles serve as stand-ins. The processional is all. An end tied up in a beginning. One
feels the House of Hapsburg receding into the
mist.
Indeed. The Captain and Mrs. Von Trapp return from
their honeymoon trip (despite the wedding having belonged to the world, one has a hard time imagining
bride and groom leaving the country) to find that the Captain
is expected to take his place in the New Order, the Third Reich. "We
make it our business to know everything about
everything," Rolfe says, reminding us that there was
once a time when the American public thought it
dangerously fascist to collect and hold data on the
citizenry (at least in principle, if not in fact).
Maria probably one of the first successful Hollywood
stepmothers (replacing empty air makes one not much
of a threat), dressed now in a mature suit with a
lower cut neck, the new Empress, sings to Liesl,
who's heartbroken over Rolfe, that when you truly
love your old ideas of life go away, grow dim, you
are someone's wife and belong to him. Oh well. But
there's no time to think about Maria's conversion to
this new altar of love, they must escape
immediately. The evil butler watches with
satisfaction from the window of the mansion, the
evident heir, as the Von Trapps are caught trying to
sneak off in the dark. "I had the impression the
contents of telegrams were private, at least in the
Austria I knew," the Captain says, reminding us that
there was once a time when the American public
thought it dangerously fascist to collect and hold
data on the citizenry.
I was ambivalent about the chemistry between Andrews
and Plummer as a child and still am, but had it been
more intense their relationship would have likely
overshadowed the children so was perhaps the right
temperature. This is, after all, the ultimate in
family films. I would love to be cynical about it,
to unravel its feel-good fabric until it stands
threadbare, but the writers have been a little too
deft, Andrews was too successful a clown, Plummer
was too successfully adult in his letting the clown
come or go, not chasing her down with boyish
histrionics. Andrews and Plummer didn't so much as
make chemistry with each other as with the screen, a
great big screen, the anonymous other, and because
of this the viewer (at least a viewer who's the
least bit willing) is never alienated from them.
Maybe that's a reason the movie has become so
popular as a kind of performance, interactive fest.
However, I can't let pass the Von Trapp performance
at the Salzburg Festival, backed by that
extraordinary theater overseen by Nazi authority in an
archaic setting that is the ghost of Roman coliseums and
out-of-control empires. I can't let pass when the
Austrian audience all joins in singing, "Bless my
homeland forever" and one is given the impression
that the last thing the Austrians wanted was a
Hitler and the Third Reich.
Because Austria's
Germans, after WWI, became less contemptuous of
Germany's Germans, and provided quite a dedicated
following for National Socialism following the 1938
Anschluss. I read that though they were only eight percent of
the Third Reich's population, the Austrians
comprised fourteen percent of the SS and "forty
percent of Nazi personnel involved in genocide", and
that attacks on Jews by Viennese mobs, following the
Anschluss, is "common knowledge".
What is peculiar also is the song "Edelweiss" which
is the one performed at the Salzburg festival in the
movie, all the audience joining in as a supposed
protest against the Anschluss. Peculiar to me for
the Anschluss became known as the "flower war" as "
flowers and arms outstretched in the Nazi salute
greeted the Whrmacht as they drove toward Vienna."
What gives?
I read a class lesson that uses "The Sound
of Music" as a base for learning history. It
discusses the Edelweiss, that it was the national
emblem for Austria, states the flower was adopted by
the Nazis into their uniform after the Anschluss,
and asks what "effect" this would have on the
Austrians. I have the feeling the students are
supposed to report this would be devastating to the
Austrians as nothing is mentioned in the lesson
about the "Flower War" and the receptivity of the
Austrians to Hitler (who was anti-Hapsburg by the way) and his policies.
Why was Austria portrayed in the screenplay as it was for an audience barely a generation removed from the truth? And Richard Rogers, who was Jewish, and the German-American Oscar Hammerstein II, both who would certainly have been aware of the "Flower War", what was their intention with "Edelweiss"? Was the song meant to be redemptive, concilliatory, an accusation, or all of these things?
Finally, the Von Trapps hide from the Nazis at the
convent. Rolfe discovers them.
Plummer faces off with him. "You're only a boy, you
don't really belong to them, come away with us
You'll never be one of them..." Was it Wise or Plummer who shifted gears from paternal reassurance to fraternal contempt that must ring like fatherly derision in Rolfe's ears. "You'll never be one of them." A nearly fatal error on the part of the Captain, both military and personal, which casts Rolfe's deciding vote with the Nazis. Senseless as the goose that laid the golden eggs, that screamed against Jack every moment he was rescuing her, Rolfe alerts the Nazis to the presence of the Von Trapps in the church cemetery where the Trapps must certainly have generations interred. Still, the Von Trapps manage to escape
and last we see them are climbing every mountain,
father leading family out of Austria to the U.S.A. (Vermont's just over that hill),
mother shepherding behind.
I like the film. I can't help but like the film as I'm vastly amused by Andrews and Plummer in it. But it's the film's politics that increasingly occupy my mind as I watch, and continue to occupy me afterward. What they did not reveal about Austria in the 40s, what they couldn't help but reveal about America in the 60s, and what they infer about the America now.
Copyright © 2005 Idyllopus
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