Fifty years ago today, on March 2, 1965, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music had its gala world premiere at the Rivoli Theater in New York. All the stars of the film were there along with Richard Rodgers, Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein (“I know Oscar would have loved it, but I expect it to be a tough evening”) and many other public figures including Adlai Stevenson, Samuel Goldwyn, Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, Beatrice Lillie, and Harry Belafonte.
Though the film would become one of the most successful motion pictures of all time, it was not met with universal acclaim by the critics. Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther said that “the whole thing is staged by Mr. Wise in a cozy-cum-corny fashion that even theater people know is old hat. Julie Andrews plays a more saccharine nanny than Mary Poppins, but it doesn’t get her goat. Her associates cannot be so commended. The septet of blond and beaming youngsters who have to act like so many Shirley Temples and Freddie Bartholomews do as well as could be expected with their assortedly artificial roles, but the adults are fairly horrendous, especially Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp. Looking as handsome and phony as a store-window Alpine guide, Mr. Plummer acts the hard-jawed, stiff-backed fellow with equal artificiality.”
Ouch. I could not disagree more, Mr. Crowther! Seeing this film as an impressionable five-year-old and watching it dozens of times since (including the yearly Sing-along Sound of Music at the Hollywood Bowl), I find Christopher Plummer’s portrayal of Captain Von Trapp deeply moving and effective. Of course, Plummer himself may agree more with Bosley Crowther’s assessment than my own. Though his view of the film has softened in recent years and he will be appearing with Andrews at a 50th Anniversary screening of the film at Grauman’s Chinese Theater later this month as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival, Plummer has often decried the schmaltziness of the film. When I interviewed Christopher Plummer last fall about his role in another film, I couldn’t resist bringing up The Sound of Music even while apologizing for doing so. “I understand the emotional appeal of that movie,” he said, laughing at my nervousness in mentioning it. “It’s a very ‘cozy’ film and they just don’t make many cozy films anymore — they haven’t for a long time.”
But as much as I have always loved The Sound of Music, I admit that as a Jewish boy growing up in Chicago, I viewed the film with a slightly distorted lens. For a story about Nazis and World War II, don’t you think that Jewish people are curiously absent? There is not a single mention of a Jew in the stage play or the film. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the worst thing the Nazis did during the war was to force families to sing at music festivals dressed in their old bedroom curtains.
Throughout my initial viewings of the film, I searched in vain for a single mention of Jews. Had Hollywood succeeded where Hitler had failed? Was their version of pre-war Europe Judenfrei — completely free of Jews? If Jewish director Robert Wise didn’t feel the need to include Jews in this story, I felt I had no choice but to find my own.
The first time I saw Julie Andrews twirling on that Austrian hilltop in brilliant 70-millimeter Technicolor, the image was so vivid I felt as if I could reach into the screen and run my hand through the mountain brook “as it trips and falls over stones on its way.” But wait! Wasn’t this the same woman who I saw the year before as Mary Poppins, the magical nanny every kid in the 1960s dreamed of having who was “practically perfect” in every way? I always wondered what happened to Mary after she left those ingrates Jane and Michael Banks in London. Now I knew — she went to Austria! In my feverish imagination, Mary had now become Maria, a postulate, or nun-in-training, at the Nonnberg Abbey in the hills of Salzburg. I already knew what nuns were thanks to my Catholic teachers Debbie Reynolds (The Singing Nun) and Audrey Hepburn (The Nun’s Story).
In my hunt for Jews in The Sound of Music, I finally decided that Maria herself must be Jewish. Maria/Mary was obviously a front for the name she was born with: Miriam. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” the nuns sing early in the film, evoking the Nazi rhetoric about “the Jewish problem.” Indeed, I came to believe that the problem of Maria was that she was a Jewess masquerading as a nun. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t belong with this somber group. From the very first scene in the film, Maria breaks all of the convent’s rules by dancing and singing in the hills, missing mass, and messing up her clothes.
I hate to have to say it
But I very firmly feel
Maria’s not an asset to the Abbey!
Where were Maria’s real parents, I wondered, and why were they never mentioned? Perhaps the Nazis had already taken them away and Maria had found shelter in the convent down the hill from her Jewish shtetl. Some of the nuns, including the Reverend Mother, seemed kind and benevolent, like many of the Righteous Gentiles who helped hide Jews during the war. But others clearly despised Maria for her differences. Remember Sister Berthe calling Maria a “demon?” I wouldn’t be surprised if that anti-Semitic nun was hiding copies of the Nazi publication Der Stürmer under her wimpole.
The problem of Maria is eventually solved by forced exile — Maria is sent to care for the seven children of the recently widowed Captain Von Trapp, a hero of the Austrian navy. While Georg Von Trapp is a fierce opponent of the encroaching Nazi regime, he runs his household as if it were an SS training camp. The children wear uniforms and answer to individualized whistles. “The Von Trapp children don’t play,” the housekeeper warns Maria on her arrival, “they march!”
But Maria changes all that. On her first day, the mischievous Von Trapp children drop a frog in their new governess’ pocket and put a pine cone on her chair which makes her jump up and yelp in pain. Instead of punishing the little devils or telling their father, Maria thanks the children profusely for their kind, welcoming behavior. By the end of her speech, all seven are reduced to tears. Maria’s skill at instigating major guilt trips was another sure sign that she was Jewish!
How I envied the seven Von Trapp children as they began to blossom under Maria’s loving care. Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta, and little Gretl. What Jewish child in America didn’t want to be one of them? What Jewish boy didn’t have a crush on Liesl, the eldest of the brood? How could we protect sweet Liesl from her boyfriend Rolf, a true Hitler youth, who later in the film (spoiler alert!) will inform on the entire family?
After Maria opens up the children’s hearts through song, Captain Von Trapp returns from a trip to Vienna with his new fiancée in tow, the Baroness Elsa Schraeder. Although rich and cultured, we soon learn of her secret plan to ship the children off to boarding school as soon as she and Georg are married. Boarding school? Was that another euphemism of the day, like the Jews being sent to “work camps” or “relocated in the East?” I wondered about Elsa’s late husband. Was Baron Schraeder a high-ranking Nazi official? The Baroness seems to possess the Nazi skill of sniffing out Jews wherever she finds them. “There goes a young woman who’s never going to be a nun,” she remarks after meeting Maria.
At the request of the Baroness, the Captain agrees to throw a lavish party just prior to the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. The whole town is invited, including Nazi sympathizers such as the evil Herr Zeller who will soon not have to hide his swastika pin behind his lapel or muffle his “Heil Hitler” salute. Maria leads the children in a song that warns the Austrians of the dangers that lie directly ahead and of the “cuckoos” that are about to take over their beautiful homeland.
Regretfully they tell us
But firmly they compel us
To say goodbye to you.
It is during the party that the Baroness tricks Maria into leaving the house by claiming that the Captain is in love with the would-be nun. Maria abandons her post and returns to the Abbey, but the Reverend Mother convinces her that she cannot hide within the walls of the convent, she must “climb every mountain” in search of her beshert — her destiny.
Maria returns to the children and, sure enough, Georg confesses his love for her and sends the Baroness packing. Maria realizes that she loves the Captain and she can’t believe her good fortune. She reviews her humble past in the shtetl:
Perhaps I had a wicked childhood
Perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past
There must have been a moment of truth
For here you are, standing there, loving me
Whether or not you should.
Whether or not he should love her? Was this a reference to the Nuremberg laws, now in effect in Nazi-controlled Austria, that prohibited Aryans from marrying Jews? It’s true that as soon as the two tie the knot, nothing but trouble follows. They return from their honeymoon to find a giant Nazi flag hanging in their doorway and then Herr Zeller announces that the Captain must accompany him to Berlin at once to take a post in the German navy. Oy, has Maria brought all this tsuris on her new family?
Never fear. Despite the passivity of Pope Pius, the nuns hide the fleeing Von Trapps from their Nazi pursuers. Amidst glorious song and a breathtaking Technicolor sunrise, the family escapes by foot up into the Austrian Alps and down into the safety of neutral Switzerland. No matter that this maneuver is geographically impossible (the real-life Von Trapps simply took the train to Switzerland), it’s the perfect ending to a near-perfect film.
My confusion over Maria’s religious background wasn’t helped the following year with the release of Julie Andrews’ next film. In Thoroughly Modern Millie, she sings a Yiddish song called “Trinkt L’Chaim” during a wedding scene and her Yiddish accent sounds as authentic as my great-grandmother Alta Toba’s.
In films and in life, Julie Andrews seemed to embody all of the qualities of the aishet chayil (women of valor) we learned about in Hebrew School. She was kind, strong, confident, and never afraid to speak her mind. Though she may be considered the quintessential shiksa to the rest of the world, to me Julie Andrews will always be Jewish.