'Sound of Music' still comes alive at 50

Fifty years ago Monday, one of our greatest and most enduring film love affairs began with the delivery of raindrops on roses. And seven adorable kids. And breathtaking views of the Austrian Alps. And a sumptuous score by the greatest songwriting team of Broadway's Golden Age.

The sum of these parts, and so much more, The Sound of Music — which premiered in New York on March 2, 1965 — went on to win five Academy Awards, including best picture, the following year. And it continues to defy all cynics. Lady Gaga's medley of Rodgers and Hammerstein's timeless tunes was among the most talked- and tweeted-about segments at this year's Oscars ceremony.

For Julie Andrews, who unforgettably traced Maria Von Trapp's journey from postulant to governess to captain's wife, the film's enduring popularity can be attributed to "so many things — the glorious music, that full symphony orchestra, the fact that it's about family and love, and adventure as well."

A number of commemorative packages and tributes are planned:

• 20th Century Fox will release a five-disc "Ultimate Collector's Edition" on Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital HD on March 10. Its 13-plus hours of bonus content include a new documentary, The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg, revisiting key sites of the film.
• Legacy Recordings unveils The Sound of Music — 50th Anniversary Edition, the same day, remastered and featuring previously released orchestral cues and all vocal performances on one CD for the first time.
• Turner Classic Movies will open its sixth annual film festival on March 26 with the restored movie, at a gala screening featuring a Q&A with Andrews and co-star Christopher Plummer.
• The movie will reappear on big screens for two days, April 19 and 22, in more than 500 theaters across the USA.
• Books have already started arriving, among them Tom Santopietro's The Sound of Music Story (St. Martin's Press) and Barry Monush's The Sound of Music FAQ (Applause Books).
• And there's even a new touring production of the original stage musical planned, directed by three-time Tony Award winner Jack O'Brien and set to launch in September at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

Plummer, whose portrayal of Captain Von Trapp will forever overshadow his many triumphant stage and screen performances in the public imagination, might be expected to have mixed feelings about all this. He was "famously unhappy" while making the movie, and quips, "It still hangs over my head like an albatross. I can't get rid of the bloody thing. But I've learned to behave myself about it."

Indeed, Plummer and Andrews have remained great friends, and have been fixtures — with the now grown men and women who played the children — at various anniversary celebrations through the years.

Plummer notes that director Robert Wise "didn't want it to be too mawkish. It helped that I was such an angry young man." But he gives more credit to Andrews, "who was at her most natural, just completely at home onscreen."

TCM host Robert Osborne observes that while detractors tend to point to Sound of Music's sentimentality, "it's one of those great stories you get totally caught up in. The Nazis are the villains, and the other people are victims of life and the times. There's suspense; it's about survival."

If the broader social and historical context is less pointed on screen than it is in the stage musical, "Hollywood managed to minimize it very cleverly," says Ted Chapin, president and executive director of Rodgers & Hammerstein: An Imagem Company, which owns and manages the duo's work. For Chapin, the film offers "perhaps the best translation we've seen from a stage to a movie screen" with a musical. "You still get all the humanity."

Not to mention the scenery. For Osborne, Sound of Music's stunning cinematography and visual scope provide a "perfect example of what movies can do better than anything else. I think here you had this lovely stage musical that was meant to be on a movie screen. ... No matter how many times you've seen it or how jaded you want to be about it, it's just a wonderfully constructed piece of entertainment."