The house lights dim and a packed crowd cheers before the movie even starts. On screen, a soaring camera carries us through windswept clouds, past snowcapped peaks, down slopes green with pines. Birdsong gives way to a lush but whimsical score as we fly low over lakes and old-world villages, farms and stone chateaus. Everyone around me seems to hitch their breath in unison with a swelling instrumental as we drop toward a broad alpine meadow where a woman spins with her arms outstretched and a grin as big as a mountain.
The audience erupts in song. “The hills are alive,” they blare, nearly drowning out the actress, “with the sound of music.” Some wear apron dresses, like Julie Andrews does on screen. Others sport dirndls and lederhosen or tweed suits, aping the fashions of Salzburg in the 1930s. All seem thrilled to sing that familiar tune in this arthouse theater in downtown Salt Lake City. They make valiant but ultimately futile attempts at harmonizing, “with songs they have sung for a thousand years.”
Well, not quite that long. Released in 1965, “The Sound of Music” tells the true-ish story of an aspiring nun-turned-governess who joins an Austrian family amid the run-up to World War II. The original premiere was too wholesome for New York critics, who called it “goody-goody,” “icky sticky” and “romantic nonsense,” but ordinary folks made it one of the top-grossing films of all time, and kept it in theaters for a whopping four-and-a-half years. It won five Academy Awards, including best picture. The soundtrack sold more than 20 million copies. Still, nobody then could have predicted the movie would become a cult classic.
This spring marks the film’s 60th anniversary. All summer, like every year, fans will descend on sing-along screenings like this one at theaters and outdoor venues all over the world. Many will do it again for the holidays, each time competing for best costume, hoarding prop bags with symbolic items to toss or wave during certain scenes, enjoying tea and cookies during the intermission and taking home mementos like themed buttons or stickers. Subtitles help us noobs to sing along. Other cues — like how you’re supposed to boo at Nazis — are more intuitive. The resulting cacophony blurs the boundary between film and audience.
It’s a grand time, but that’s not why I’m here. There are other films whose loyal fans act out extravagant viewing rituals. And this is not the only classic that people still watch with such frequency. But in our cynical age, it’s surprising that people connect this deeply to a feel-good musical with old-fashioned values. What is it about this sentimental story that keeps them so enthralled? I came here to find out.
A respite amid turmoil
Honestly, “The Sound of Music” was always a little retro — a simple, heartfelt tale first told in another time of great social upheval. On the day it premiered in March, the United States Air Force started bombing North Vietnam, soon inspiring massive anti-war demonstrations in the nation’s capital. That same weekend in Alabama, peaceful protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery to guarantee Black people the right to vote were attacked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday.” That summer, Bob Dylan was getting booed for adopting the electric guitar; and hippies were saying, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
Even then, the cinema could offer wholesome respite from an increasingly complex world. Hits that year included Walt Disney’s “That Darn Cat!,” a Jack Lemmon comedy called “The Great Race,” and “Doctor Zhivago,” an epic romance set largely in opposition to Russia’s communist revolution. None were R-rated; the MPAA rating system didn’t exist and didn’t seem necessary. The golden age of musical films had waned, but “My Fair Lady,” “Mary Poppins” and “West Side Story” showed that the earnest genre was still a good commercial bet. No wonder 20th Century Fox snatched up the film rights to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit about a singing nun that won five Tony Awards in 1960.
I watch my neighbors as much as the screen. By the time the governess sings “My Favorite Things,” they’ve all but merged with the film.
The studio tabbed director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who had partnered on “West Side Story,” to helm the project. Wise didn’t expect to make an all-time classic; he just needed to keep his bosses happy while he worked on “The Sand Pebbles,” a challenging anti-war epic set during the Chinese revolution as an allegory for Vietnam. When he met with Maria von Trapp — the inspiration for the female lead who had sold the rights to her 1949 memoir years before — Wise told her to expect a moving film, rather than a realistic one.
Even so, the broad strokes would remain rather true to life, and that probably contributed to the movie’s early appeal. World War II was not a distant memory then; many recalled the uncertain events of 1938, when the story’s most dramatic events take place. Imperial Japan had invaded China. Fascist-aligned Nationalists were throttling pro-democratic Republicans in the Spanish Civil War while cautious Western leaders refused to pick a side. The U.S. and United Kingdom would soon stop accepting Jewish refugees. And one day before Austrians were set to vote in a referendum on their country’s annexation into the Third Reich, Germany invaded, calling it the “Anschluss.”
The film is set in the months before that historic event. The fictitious Maria is an exuberant young novice at the Nonnberg Abbey. Concerned that Maria may not fit there, the abbess sends her to work for retired naval Captain Georg von Trapp, played by Christopher Plummer, as governess to his seven children. In his grief, the widowed father has become regimented and distant from his kids — Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta and Gretl. They’ve taken out their frustrations on Maria’s predecessors, scaring them off with mischievous pranks. Maria’s arrival sets off a chain of events that will eventually save them all, with kindness.
Cult film cornerstones
A thunderstorm breaks out while the captain is away. Frightened, the children gather in Maria’s room. From my seat at the back of the theater, I watch my neighbors as much as the screen. By the time the governess distracts the kids from their fears, singing instead about “My Favorite Things,” the audience has all but merged with the film. At “doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles,” they ring little silver bells. They toss fistfuls of white feathers in the air as “wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings.” We can all benefit from a little positive thinking.
Costumes and silly props are common at screenings of certain cult classics, a term often used to describe films that perform poorly on initial release but later find a loyal repeat audience who engage beyond the simple act of viewing. Academics debate the definition of a cult film, but the list of qualifiers is probably longer than you think. Wikipedia even identifies eight subgenres, from “so bad it’s good” to Japanese anime and nostalgia. Some are low-budget, like “Napoleon Dynamite” or the early “Godzilla” series. Others are just weird. “Any film is potentially a cult classic,” says Timothy Corrigan, emeritus professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “It depends to what extent it fires up or activates an audience to appropriate parts of it or all of it in terms of their own perception.”
These days, serious movies tend to feel dark, often ending in ambiguity and gloom. It’s striking how inspiring this feels, considering such difficult subject matter.
But there is one common thread: repetition. “One cornerstone of the cult film is spending time with a film you’ve seen many times before,” says Ernest Mathijs, professor of cinema at the University of British Columbia. “You come together, and, in the case of ‘Sound of Music,’ you sing along.” The film’s first sing-along screening was held in 1999 in London, then stateside in Boston, Austin and New York, where a few surviving cast members even attended the opening. Now, it’s a global phenomenon.
This is clearly not my cohort’s first time. As the children’s singing voices echo through the family’s extravagant palace, I notice one family bracing for the turning point. The captain is on the verge of firing Maria after learning that his children were out in public wearing the “play clothes” she made for them from discarded drapes and splashing around after their boat overturned in the lake by his villa. But the music draws him inside, where he finds the kids singing a choral number for his fiancée, a baroness. Instead of scolding them this time, he joins in. In the row in front me, a father and son wrap their arms around each other and hum in tune.
Without giving away any spoilers, the film’s most intimate storyline tells of a family divided by tragedy who find their way back to each other with patience, love and a little help from the father’s unlikely new romantic interest. “It’s about a fractured family healing,” says Tom Santopietro, author of “The Sound of Music Story,” “and people want to believe that can happen with their families as well.”
Even so, that plot becomes even more stirring in the context of larger world events.
Heros and villains
The captain comes home to find an unfamiliar banner draped above the entrance to the Von Trapp family villa. He has just returned from a long honeymoon abroad with his new bride to a country that no longer exists. While he was gone, German troops rolled in against little or no resistance, occupying Austria and incorporating it into the Third Reich. Now, from the center of a white circle against a red field, a black swastika glares back at him. Sternly, he yanks down the Nazi flag and rips it in half. Almost without emotion, like taking out the trash.
This is perhaps the film’s most iconic moment. It may also tell us something about its timeless appeal. For decades, since the Allies defeated Germany in 1945, Nazis have been seen as a common enemy, a historic aberration that embodied much of what we fear in humanity and a warning against our worst excesses. The swastika stood for an ideology of total government authority, favoring one race and embracing violence as a policy tool, systematically slaughtering six million Jews among more than 17 million total victims, outside of combat.
They were easy to cast as Hollywood’s go-to villains. From John Wayne in “The Longest Day” to Indiana Jones and Captain America, our heroes have made hay fighting fictitious but clearly uniformed Nazis on screen. Even Luke Skywalker rebels against an evil space empire arrayed in Nazi style and headed by his own father, who cajoles his son to join him so they can “restore order to the galaxy” through total domination; instead, Skywalker eventually convinces his father to abandon the “dark side” and embrace the good in himself. This gets at the trouble with ideological conflict: The first battleground is the human heart.
In this sense, “The Sound of Music” may be more realistic. Signs of a creeping tolerance and even embrace of fascist ideas have surfaced subtly throughout the movie, and when Germany invades, it finds enough sympathy among the Austrian people to avoid shedding blood. The captain finds himself surrounded by enemies who were once his neighbors, like the mayor-turned-gauleiter, now a regional Nazi leader who demands to be greeted with what people today are calling a “Roman salute.” Others closer to the Von Trapps betray them in ways that I won’t spoil. The captain is heartbroken but unbending, and his family stands with him.
“In the end, you can sing your way through fascism. That’s a nice thought these days.”
Their courage to live by their convictions in a time when doing so is not just unpopular but also dangerous represents a different kind of heroism, one that may be easier for us to see ourselves emulating. It’s only more powerful when you consider the real-life family behind the story. “All of us who watch the movie would like to believe that we would have the integrity and character to stand up to the Nazis,” Santopietro says. “We would like to think that we would have that moral courage. It’s as if we idealize portraits of ourselves.”
Captain Von Trapp carries his youngest daughter across a luxurious green field high in the Alps. Maria and the kids follow single-file, adopting his military discipline. I watch them escape Austria in secret, with a comical assist from Maria’s friends at the abbey, crossing the mountains on foot with the few possessions they can carry. The same granite peaks from the opening scene now tower overhead, a reminder of how small the family must feel amid the geopolitical chaos that brought them to this bittersweet moment. They’ve lost their country, but they’ve got each other, and a path to freedom. I believe this radical hope is what keeps the film’s allure alive.
The real Von Trapps didn’t have to walk, but they did leave the country just in time, boarding a train to Italy the day before Austria sealed its borders on a musical tour they would never return from. And they didn’t leave behind a palace. In fact, they had lost their fortune during the Great Depression. After arriving in the United States in 1939 as humble immigrants, they settled in Stowe, Vermont. They formed a touring group called the Trapp Family Singers. Later, they converted their lodge into a ski resort that is still operational. Maria and Georg are both buried there, in the family cemetery. On screen, of course, none of that has happened yet.
Tears fall in the cinema as the family marches onward, serenaded by a distant choir of voices. “Climb ev’ry mountain / Ford every stream / Follow every rainbow / Till you find your dream.” These days, serious movies tend to feel dark, often ending in ambiguity and gloom. It’s striking how inspiring this one feels, considering such difficult subject matter. But they were able to survive, so perhaps this modern audience can do the same. Perhaps believing is enough. Perhaps any storm can be weathered if enough voices sing against it.
“Most films that deal, even tangentially, with the Holocaust or fascist Germany are pretty serious,” Corrigan says. But in this case, the film “signals that darkness, that seriousness, but it reperforms it as a kind of happy romance in a way. In the end, you can sing your way through fascism. That’s a nice thought these days.”
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.