Stream it now The Sound of Music Reset Status Want to Watch Already Watched Don't Want to Watch

,haha . Wonderful contribution, thanks

The Hills are alive with the sound of music !

incredible.

i have watched this film so many times over the years and still love it , its fantastic to watch and enjoy a movie and sing along.

i think this could be the film that i have seen the most times , as i have been watching it since i can remember.


Julie Andrews is amazing

The sound of music is the best musical film ever made. The story is outstanding, the song wonderful and the acting amazing. This film is not all fluff as many other may think it is. The film does take a dark turn during the last half. This is a film that will never be forgotten.

Where: DVD
Genres: Musical & Performing Arts, Musicals, Classic, Family Interaction, Musical, Romance, True Story, Recommended, Clergy, Family Film, Essential Cinema

One line review: I can't believe this is my first time watching the whole thing.

I picked up the soundtrack on a lark about a year ago from the library and quite enjoyed it. I figured with that "sing-a-long sound of music" craze it had to be good and I was right. I was pretty sure I'd seen the film when I was a kid but I guess I was wrong. It's so much better when you have an authentic half-german singing along with all the songs beside you.

TomatoMeter: 90% People: 89% Average: 89%
(Rotten Tomatoes) (IMDB)

Cast:
Star Julie Andrews (Victor/Victoria - 100%, S.O.B. - 100%, Thoroughly Modern Millie - 100%, The Americanization of Emily - 100%, Mary Poppins - 100%)
Star Christopher Plummer (The Insider - 95%, 12 Monkeys - 86%)
Director Robert Wise (West Side Story - 93%, I Want to Live - 100%, Day the Earth Stood Still - 91%, Curse of the Cat People - 100%, The Magnificent Ambersons - 93%)
Writer Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success - 100%)
Composer Richard Rodgers (South Pacific - 80%, King and I - 100%, Oklahoma - 100%, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum - 100%)
Composer Irwin Kostal (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - 57%, Mary Poppins - 100%)

Awards:
Oscar Best Director: Robert Wise
Oscar Best Film Editing: William Reynolds
Oscar Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment: Irwin Kostal
Oscar Best Picture: Robert Wise
Oscar Best Sound: James Corcoran
Golden Globe Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy: Julie Andrews

IT IS CERTAINLY A WELL LOVED MOVIE. SINCE I AM NOT MUCH OF A MUSICAL FAN, MY RATING MAY BE A BIT LOWER THAN MOST, BUT AS MUSICALS GO IT'S NOT BAD. THE STORY IS INDEED A GOOD ONE. ANDREWS IS FINE. OVER SENTIMENTAL AT TIMES, OVERLONG. FINELY PRODUCED. GOOD SCORE.

.....

[WERTHAM CONFESSES: Without a word of a lie, I actually become physically ill whenever this monstrosity is exhumed for the delectation of the blue-hairs. But then again: You can't argue with success.

Its director was the editor of "Citizen Kane." Its screenwriter was the author of "North by Northwest." Its composers were the most successful songwriting team in American theater history. And "The Sound of Music" was the movie that everybody hated but the people.

Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp himself, is said to have called it "The Sound of Mucus." Robert Wise, the director, worried with Julie Andrews, the eternal Maria Poppins, about what they could do to remove a spoonful (or two) of the schmaltz. Pauline Kael, who would become the reigning film critic of her era, denounced it as "the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat."

And yet. And yet 40 years ago this Memorial Day weekend, "The Sound of Music" was not just the summer movie of 1965. It was the spring, fall and winter one, too, and in inflation-adjusted dollars, it remains the third-biggest-grossing film of all time at the domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo. It hit the Billboard Top 40 video sales chart shortly after it became one of the first movies ever released on home video in 1979, and still holds the chart's longevity record, of more than 300 weeks and counting.

Twentieth Century Fox plans to release a special 40th-anniversary two-DVD edition in November, with new documentary material (including interviews with Ms. Andrews, other cast members and creators) prepared by Michael Kantor, who directed the PBS series "Broadway: The American Musical" last year.

What explains such colossal success? "It's mainly the script," said Mr. Wise, who will turn 91 in September and once estimated that he had been asked that question an average of twice a week since the film's premiere on March 2, 1965. "It's a family film, nothing more universal."

When Ernest Lehman, the highly regarded screenwriter of movies like "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and "Sweet Smell of Success" told his friend Burt Lancaster that he was working on "The Sound of Music," Lancaster responded, "Jesus, you must need the money!"

But, in hindsight, a compelling case can be made for "The Sound of Music," as the last picture show of its kind, a triumph of craftsmanship and the apogee of the studio system that produced the kind of entertainment that dominated mid-20th-century mass culture. When it opened, it displaced "Gone With the Wind" (by then already 26 years old), as the all-time box-office champion in nominal dollars, a position it held for seven years through Vietnam, assassinations and political turmoil until "The Godfather" knocked it off in 1972.

It was at once the salvation (and very nearly the death knell) of its own studio, rescuing Fox from the financial disaster of "Cleopatra" but also sending the studio in quest of similar surefire successes that wound up as famous failures, like Rex Harrison's "Doctor Dolittle" and "Hello, Dolly!" (It's hard to hold a moonbeam in your hand.)

With its breathtaking Austrian locations and complex outdoor musical sequences, "The Sound of Music," building on Mr. Wise's film of "West Side Story" before it, had the bad luck to liberate the film musical forever from the soundstage-bound conventions that once forced pigeons to fly into painted backdrops in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," at the very moment that four nightingales from Liverpool were helping to change mass musical taste forever.

A film that was easy to mock as stale and conventional in the wake of the French Nouvelle Vague (and on the brink of "Bonnie and Clyde") is far easier to appreciate now for its old-fashioned gloss and arch performances from silken pros like Eleanor Parker, who played the Baroness with the poise of an early Avedon model; Peggy Wood, the Mother Abbess, who had made her Broadway debut in "Naughty Marietta" in 1910; and Anna Lee, the doughty veteran of the John Ford stock company who played Sister Margaretta.

From the moment on Broadway in 1959 that Mary Martin, the first Maria, sang that her day in the hills had come to an end, critics dismissed "The Sound of Music" as the least original work of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the men who did more than any other to bring the Broadway musical - arguably America's most original art form, together with jazz - to full flower in path-breaking works like "Oklahoma!" "Carousel" and their Pulitzer Prize-winning "South Pacific."

"Not only too sweet for words but almost too sweet for music," Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Herald Tribune.

But from the very beginning, the public lapped it up. Ms. Kael lost her job as movie critic for McCall's after her infamous panning, and the film has since survived innumerable television reruns (Ronald Reagan once skipped reading an economic-summit briefing book to watch it), cast reunions and high-camp "Rocky Horror"-style sing-alongs that began in London in 1999, with audience members dressed as brown-paper packages and tea with jam and bread.

The first major Austrian production of the stage version (quite different from the film) is now playing at Vienna's venerable Volksoper, where it has received no better than mixed reviews but immense popular acclaim. Worldwide, "The Sound of Music" alternates with "Oklahoma!" as the most-produced Rodgers and Hammerstein property, and even an informal tally would suggest that, over all, it has been the most profitable, said Bert Fink, a spokesman for the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization in New York.

One of the main achievements of Mr. Lehman's screenplay was to discard some of the lesser songs from the Broadway production, and re-order others, including "My Favorite Things" (which was sung onstage to Maria by the Mother Abbess, not by Maria to the von Trapp kids during a thunderstorm) and "Do-Re-Mi," which was sung the moment Maria met the children, not all over Salzburg in a still-thrilling sequence painstakingly worked out by Mr. Wise and Saul Chaplin, a veteran Hollywood music director and the movie's associate producer.

"Nobody has the magic wand, or there'd be movies like this done all the time," said Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who estimates that anniversary-related activities surrounding "The Sound of Music" have occupied more than 90 percent of his time in the last two months. "In retrospect, it's a very good story, with very good tunes. The score doesn't really sound like a score written by 60-year-old men. There's a kind of youthfulness and honesty to the songs, about how to learn music, but also how to break down barriers. It doesn't sound like someone's trying to phony something up."

Even Ms. Kael implicitly acknowledged the movie's power.

"Whom could it offend?" she asked in her famous McCall's drubbing. "Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated."

Forty years and a lot less innocence later, in the era of film as theme-park thrill ride and prepackaged comic-book sequel, a little artful manipulation seems a small enough price, and "The Sound of Music" a big enough blessing. Let it bloom and grow.

-TODD S. PURDUM

(DVD) (Who knows how many viewings anymore, 7 Wise films seen)

As a self-described devotee of all films that quirky, obscure and/or subtitled, what is it about this monstrous sugar-coated musical that draws me in again and again? And the thing is, the more I see it, the more I like it-- and I'll be damned if I didn't write a 3000 word plus review on the new DVD release for DVD Verdict!

There's so much to like: Julie Andrew's relentlessly upbeat Maria, Christopher Plummer's nuanced (with just a dash of subversiveness) interpretation of the Captain, the glorious music, the visual splendor, the innocence... but what really struck me this time around was how capably the film is directed by veteran director Robert Wise. At it's core THE SOUND OF MUSIC is so tightly constructed, which is the only way that the entire film doesn't overwhelm itself with sugar, sunshine and song. But at the same time, the massive scope of the film seems to be subsumed by the intimate story, and so the film doesn't appear at first glance to be as technically innovative as it is.

A class act-- but I've had to "grow up" to realize it. A favorite thing indeed.


NOTE: And the new 40th Anniversary DVD release is really spectacular. It's one of the best I've come across, and certainly the best I've reviewed so far for DVD Verdict.

Here's some film ratings.

One of my favorite movies. It might be on the sweet side, but sometimes just exactly what it is needed. Anyway, there's Christopher Plummer as the captain to balance out all that sweetness. Julie Andrews at freshest and best. Her singing is wonderful, the alps are beautiful, songs are memorable, and story line never gets boring.