A Song in the Key of F the N*zis

I recently remembered that the 1965 film The Sound of Music, based on the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, contains a moment in which Christopher Plummer rips a N*zi flag in half, and I said to myself, “I want THAT in my eyeballs.” Does it qualify as a period drama if it’s set less than three decades before it was made? Normally I’d say no, but the gulf between the pre- and post-World War II eras is arguably bigger than the difference between whole centuries of the Middle Ages, so let’s allow it.

I’d seen The Sound of Music at some point in childhood but retained only a vague impression that it was kinda sappy and that most of the songs were not my cup of tea. I was right on one of these counts, but the wonders of modern technology allowed me to skip 80 percent of the songs, shaving the 174-minute runtime down to a tight hour and a half that absolutely rocked.

I did not skip the opening number, which follows a lonnnng series of aerial shots of Salzburg, Austria. Along with the titular song, that footage serves a narrative purpose: establishing that this is a place the protagonist loves, a place you would love, a place nobody should have to leave because fascists are trying to ruin it.  

So: We’re in Salzburg. It’s sometime before March 1938. (Winter never blights the film’s idyllic scenery, so don’t think too hard about the timeline.) We meet Maria, a hot but lonely apprentice* nun with a knack for singing and losing track of time. Played by the eternally impeccable Julie Andrews, Maria is a fictionalized version of Maria Kuczera, who wrote the 1949 memoir on which this musical is loosely, and I mean L O O S E L Y, based. 

At the abbey, the nuns sing a fairly snarky song about Maria that I mostly skipped, the gist of which is that she might have ADHD? They then shuffle her off to a temp job that could not possibly go wrong for someone who struggles with executive function and time management: being the governess to seven (7) (!) rich kids between the ages of sixteen and five, who’ve driven every other prospective governess back to the mines with their incorrigible antics. I kinda feel like the nuns are just messing with her tbh.

Maria is hyped to see something besides the abbey and the alive musical hills, but also understandably nervous about this new experience. I did listen to all of “I Have Confidence” because, frankly, I was looking for tips.

At the von Trapp estate, Maria meets her seven (7!!!) charges and their father, retired navy hero Captain Georg von Trapp, played by thirty-seven-year-old DILF Christopher Plummer. The real Georg was forty-six when he met twenty-one-year-old Maria Kuczera, so this is a shameless glow-up. The real Georg was also reportedly a warmhearted and friendly guy, instead of the gruff, cold, extremely f*ckable character we meet here. For that matter, the real children had different names, genders, and ages than these movie children, thus depriving audiences of characters named Rupert, Werner, and Hedwig.

Maria’s actions continue to support my armchair ADHD diagnosis in the following ways: 

• Told to stay put upon entering the foyer, she immediately forgets to do so and wanders into another room, getting her meeting with Cap off to a rocky start. 

• When Cap informs her she’ll have to learn every child’s personalized call sign on the whistle** he uses to summon them, she’s like “lol not happening.”

• Her hyper-fixation game is ON POINT. This woman sews outfits for all seven (7!) (SEVEN!!!) children out of two curtains in twelve hours. She goes from teaching them a basic scale to conducting them in multipart harmony in, like, a week. She orchestrates a puppet show that would bring the Fringe Festival to its knees. 

In short order, Maria wins over the kids, including Liesl, who’s roughly five minutes younger than she is but will (spoiler alert) soon be happily calling Maria “Mother.” Liesl and her loser boyfriend, Rolf, get their own song, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” in which Liesl insists that she’s both almost grown-up and not yet grown-up enough to recognize red flags. Rolf is way into that. I listened to exactly one verse of this song before fast-forwarding. Ditto “Do-Re-Me.” I watched the entirety of the puppet show song, “The Lonely Goatherd,” because the puppet show was genuinely next level. I regret nothing.

Cap misses his kids’ evolution into musical prodigies because he’s hanging out with his girlfriend in Vienna. But soon he brings said girlfriend, the completely fictional and clearly Blanche-Ingram-inspired Baroness Elsa Schraeder, back to Salzburg along with their mostly-fictional chum Max, a prime example of LGBTQ+ representation in ‘60s media: archly witty, a little devious, outwardly too cool for school while secretly Type-A enough to foil an occupying military force, but more on that later.

Cap is miffed that the kids are running amok having fun instead of swabbing a deck or something. When Maria calls him out for being emotionally unavailable to his SEVEN!!! motherless children, he fires her, only to walk it back when a minute of his kids’ singing does the work of several years’ worth of grief counseling. (Men will literally treat their children like subordinates on a seafaring vessel instead of going to therapy, etc. etc.) His apology to Maria is legit enough to feature on my list of Reasons to Marry Captain von Trapp, along with “v hot” and “hates N*zis.”

Speaking of N*zis: Germany is breathing down Austria’s neck, and on more than one occasion Cap responds to sentiments ranging from “Welp, gotta appease ’em, amirite” (Max) to “Hitler is our god-king” (Evil Neighbor Dude) with “Shut TF up and get out of my house.” Maria, lock that down. 

There aren’t a ton of opportunities for Maria and Cap to get to know each other on screen, what with all the singing taking up so much time. But we do see them develop mutual respect: Cap clearly admires Maria for being a creative powerhouse who doesn’t put up with his BS, and Maria is like “Oh dang, he’s a hot antifascist AND he can sing one (1) song—swoon.” They also have excellent chemistry, even though Christopher Plummer by his own admission spent most of this shoot being grumpy. (I did verify that he and Julie Andrews were friendly later on, and fwiw they’ve had only nice things to say about each other in the 1.5 million interviews they’ve done about this movie.) 

Cap’s “I’m Into Maria” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the shirt, especially Elsa. Which: fair. Cap recently told Elsa she’d given his life new meaning, and one puppet show later he’s kicking off an emotional affair. Elsa doesn’t deserve that; she’s not a straight-up villain. The only true villains in this movie are the N*zis. Elsa’s just a fun, rich, hot lady who’s not great with kids. Her boyfriend wasn’t great with kids either until two scenes ago, so that probably wasn’t a compatibility issue for them at first.

Obviously, though, I’m Team Maria, and I’m shipping her and Cap despite Cap’s dicey handling of his relationship status.

In a heavily Blanche-Ingram-coded move, Elsa convinces Maria that the sexy turn the (invented-for-the-movie) traditional folk dance took is All Her Fault and She Must Leave. Which is where the first act ends! On a cliffhanger! With Maria sneaking out of the house! Then there’s an INTERMISSION. Wtf! How is the movie only halfway done?!

The first few minutes of Act II are a whirlwind: The kids try to visit Maria at the abbey only to be told “Sorry, her status is set to Do Not Disturb.” Cap copes with her absence by getting officially engaged to Elsa, a big yikes for everyone involved. The abbey’s CEO*** encourages Maria to follow her heart, so she dashes back to the von Trapp estate, only to find out about the engagement. She pivots, saying she’ll just stay “until you find another governess.” Ma’am, I’m pretty sure this family’s already tried all the other governesses in the Salzburg metro area, but sure.

I honestly enjoyed these scenes. Cap’s wrestling with his commitment to Elsa vs. his pining for Maria is funnier than it probably should be. And his interactions with the kids are much more fun now that music has returned to the house and thawed the Byronic icicles off his heart. Plus, eleven-year-old Kurt discovering he's going to miss out on dinner and IMMEDIATELY saying wistfully “I wonder what grass tastes like” is a criminally underrated moment.

Cap finally breaks up with Elsa, proposes to Maria in a very Jane Eyre-esque scene that of course delighted me, marries her while the nuns reprise her negative performance review for some reason, and takes her on a monthlong honeymoon because remember, he’s rich.

While they’re gone, the Anschluss happens and the N*zis swarm in. Oh, and Max enters the kids in a music festival-slash-competition. It’s a tossup which development will tick off Cap more when he gets back; he does NOT want his kids performing in public, presumably because either A) he knows fame can cause deep psychic damage to youngsters, or B) he thinks it’s vulgar? Nobody ever interrogates his reasoning because it’d probably make him less likable and we only have time to dislike N*zis.

Case in point: Liesl asks Rolf why he’s been flaking on her lately and he’s like “Sorry, babe, I'm too busy being a N*zi.” This is a valuable counternarrative to the idea that “male loneliness” drives dudes to get fashy. Rolf has a cute girlfriend who’s very into him and yet he ghosts her for Hitler!

The N*zis wanna know where Cap is and why he hasn’t been in touch with anyone all month. Max is like “He’s been busy having sex!!!” Airtight logic: It is impossible to bang your hot young wife and mail a postcard to your kids on the same day. But Cap and Maria are back now, just in time for Cap to rip that N*zi flag in half. He finds out he’s being drafted into the German navy and tells Maria they need to GTFO of Austria. TONIGHT. Two hours into the runtime, the stakes have ARRIVED.

This sequence might be my favorite in the whole movie. Even though these two have been married exactly four weeks, they’re in lockstep here: When Max is like “Maria, can’t you convince Georg to become a collaborator?” she’s like “mm, he’s much hotter as an antifascist, imo.” And when Cap goes over the options with her, he talks to her like they’ve been figuring out how to resist evil empires together for years. (This also might be the most historically accurate aspect of their relationship. While the real Maria wasn’t super into the real Georg when she married him, and was basically accepting a job offer to become his kids’ new mom, she ended up head over heels. By 1938 they’d been married more than a decade and had three more kids.) Get yourself a man who looks at you the way Captain von Trapp looks at Maria when he’s telling her their homeland is cooked.

They try to tiptoe out of town with their car, get caught, and cover by claiming they’re just on their way to perform at the music festival. So of course they now have to perform at the musical festival! They crush the competition despite letting the “tea with jam and bread” bit get out of hand. Cap sings his one (1) song, which happens to be about loving Austria, with a subtext of hating N*zis, and therefore automatically EGOT-worthy. 

They sneak out of the venue with help from Max and, I gotta assume, from the competition’s runner-up, who milks her time onstage assiduously enough to buy them at least thirty seconds. (I do worry about Max, despite his collaboration-curious behavior. Like, everyone knows he’s Cap’s friend, and now Cap’s vanished on his watch. Won’t the N*zis punish Max? Maybe we’re supposed to assume he’s wily enough to wriggle out of any trouble, which seems fraught for multiple reasons. Then again, maybe the uncertainty of his fate is part of the complex grief we’re meant to feel for everything the von Trapps are leaving behind. Does the “bury your gays” trope apply here? Much to ponder!)

The family temporarily hides out at the abbey, because THE NUNS ARE GETTING NARRATIVE PAYOFF. The nuns are now the stars of this movie. They are icons of resistance: the literal slow-walking of admitting the N*zis to the premises, the misdirection, the sabotage of the N*zis’ vehicles. These nuns would’ve been at their local T*sla Takedown rallies. Heck, a couple of them might’ve set fire to their local T*sla showroom. I officially forgive them for reprising their roast of Maria at her own wedding.

If the nuns become heroes, Rolf becomes... more of what he already was. He catches the von Trapps and pulls his gun on them, wavers when Cap challenges him, and eventually calls for backup. By that point Cap has stalled him long enough for the family to escape. For me, this is the one misstep in Plummer’s performance, because the way he talks to Rolf is downright seductive. Though I guess one way to convince somebody he’s “not like them” is to spark a bi awakening in him, so maybe not the worst strategy. At any rate, Rolf is a pathetic worm and I hope he dies miserable and alone, the fate all fascists deserve.

The von Trapps, now carless, decide to cross the Alps on foot. (IRL they just took a train, but don’t overthink it.) Look, after seeing their puppet show, I believe they can do anything. I would’ve trusted them to bring those astronauts home from the International Space Station. So they walk off into the mountains, leaving the alive musical hills of Austria behind but facing the future together, and I’m not crying, you’re crying. 

To wrap up, here are some entirely subjective ratings on a scale of 1 through 5! 

Plot, pacing, and structure: 4 (taking into account the 47ish minutes of musical content I ignored; without all those reprises, it’s a 5)

Characters: 5 (I love Maria and Cap, enjoy Elsa and Max and the nuns, hate the N*zis, and am generally not annoyed by the kids)

Historical accuracy: 3 (plenty of creative license, but no narratively baffling changes, and no egregious departures from the larger historical context—namely, Germany annexing Austria and N*zis being The Worst) 

Themes: 5 (follow your heart, fill your house with music, and F the N*zis forever)

Thanks for joining me! I’ll be back in your inbox in a few weeks!

*Yes, technically this is called a novice; yes, I was raised Catholic

**Technically a boatswain’s call; no, I am not a sailor

***AKA the abbess, who btw is a very impressive singer!