Anniversary of The Sound of Music
On March 2, 1965 at the New York Theater Rivoli the premiere of the musical biopic “The Sound of Music” took place. The director of the film is Robert Wise.
The film is a musical of the same name transferred to the film which was very successful on the stages of Broadway since 1959.
The musical was based on the memoirs of Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp (nee Kutschera), published in 1949 under the title “The Story of the Trapp Family Singers”.
Using the "right of the first night," Bosley Crowther, a New York Times film critic was the first who literally the day after its New York premiere, reviewed the film. His review was filled with his usual caustic and sarcastic remarks, such as:
"Looking as handsome and phony as a store-window Alpine guide, Mr. Plummer acts the hard-jawed, stiff-backed fellow with equal artificiality." Or: "Miss Andrews is nothing daunted. She plays a more saccharine nanny than Mary Poppins, but it doesn't get her goat."
Well, and so on in the same vein.
However, not only Crowther spoke negatively about the film. A number of other, less well-known film critics blasphemed the film no less hard, filling their reviews with maxims, such as:
"We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs." (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker magazine).
Moreover, even the performer of one of the main roles - Christopher Plummer - was ashamed of this film, calling it "Sound of Mucus". Perhaps this negativity was explained by the fact that Plummer specially learned to play the guitar to play the role and independently performed all the vocal parts, but in the end his performance was replaced by the performance of another, more professionally vocal artist.
However, viewers were deaf to the critics' exhortations crowding around the mouthpiece of the US Democratic Party. In the first year of demonstration in American cinemas, more than 142 million people watched the film. That is more than 73% of the population! And another 30 million British moviegoers watched this film. Again, over 55% of the UK population.
With a budget of $ 8.2 million, the film around the world raised more than $ 286 million, i.e., almost 35 times more than its cost.
Just like moviegoers, for whom, in fact, films are made, American film academics did not agree in the assessment of the film with American film critics. The film obtained 10 Academy Award nominations, of which 5 received, including the most important ones: as Best Picture and for Best Director. In addition, "Sound of Music" received the Golden Globe as Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical.
Already today, the famous American film critic James Berardinelli, who admits that he shares his views with Bosley Crowther, Pauline Kael and others, is trying to explain the reason for such a deep difference of opinion between critics, on the one hand, and moviegoers, on the other. In his review, he writes:
"The Sound of Music represented a bastion of uplifting serenity during a time of social upheaval. Released 18 months after JFK’s assassination and in the midst of the civil rights turmoil, it offered escapism in its purest form."
In other words, the American people, according to Berardinelli, even a year and a half after the assassination of the president continued to be in such a state of excitement that could not eat without tranquilizers in the form of musicals.
Or maybe the real reason is completely different? Maybe the real reason is that the film “Sound of Music” has a pronounced anti-Nazi character, which inflicts mental wounds on some American critics who do not dare to admit to this? Maybe the thing is that, as you know, long before the "Sound of Music", Robert Wise wanted to make a film based on Richard McKenna’s novel "The Sand Pebbles". But all the film companies in the USA refused to finance him, realizing that he would get a film "about the vile diploma of gunboats - and not of the Third Reich, but of the motherland - of the USA". And only 20th Century Fox, which were saved by Robert Wise and its "Sound of Music" from bankruptcy, in gratitude provided Wise with the necessary financial resources for filming. Wise was so obsessed with working on "The Sand Pebbles" that he didn’t even come from Hong Kong for an Oscar.
In fairness, it should be noted that many of the comments of film critics, mainly regarding historical inaccuracies and direct distortions of facts, are absolutely logical. It is known that a number of claims about these distortions were presented to the authors of the film by Maria von Trapp herself. The real children of von Trapp also reported that the authors of the film, firstly, mixed up their names, and, secondly, some character traits inherent in their father attributed them to their stepmother, etc. All this is so. But, firstly, the film, of course, is based on the memoirs of Maria von Trapp, and secondly, as Robert Wise himself explained, the copyright was purchased from Maria von Trapp, and the rights were agreed upon when signing the copyright agreement that he was not making a "documentary or realistic movie" about her family, and that he would make the film with "complete dramatic freedom" in order to produce a "fine and moving film" — one they (Trapps) could all be proud of. And so it happened.
Regarding the current rating by the audience of this film, 71% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film a rating of 8 to 10.
Based on the foregoing, the film "The Sound of Music", according to FilmGourmand, has a rating of 8.394 and occupies 369th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
