I love `The Sound of Music' - but I understand why some don't

Rating: 10/10 (30 August 1999)

What Rodgers may lack of pure style, / He makes up for - well, once in a while - / By the way he can bluster / From the depths of lacklustre / To the almost transcendently vile.
Apologies to John Ciardi, who composed a version of this limerick in honour of someone else - but it exactly sums up my attitude towards Richard Rodgers and, to a lesser extent, Oscar Hammerstein. Rodgers was never much of a musician. His spectacular box-office success makes little sense when you consider that his contemporaries included (at different times) George Gershwin, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein - all composers who could blow him out of the water and who all, incidentally, wrote better songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein specialised in middlebrow inoffensiveness. But every so often they would leave this realm and enter that of the positively bad: `Surrey with a Fringe on Top', `A Gal Who Can't Say No', `Clam Bake', `I'm Gonna to Wash that Man Right out of My Hair' and `State Fair' are all songs with a pungent stink.
`The Sound of Music' is their best work. It never stinks, it's heartfelt, and at any rate it avoids the air of calculated innovation and phoney bigness that pervades most of their other musicals. And this is a glorious transfer to the screen, it really is. (Note that Robert Wise was also responsible for the screen version of `West Side Story'.) Its weaknesses stem from weaknesses in the original. For instance:
Too many songs occur in performances for the benefit of other characters - it's the old let's-put-on-a-show problem. By the end of `Lonely Goatherd' we are fidgeting and wondering when we'll ever be done with the impromptu theatrical productions, and if the story will ever be allowed to proceed. The lyrics for `Something Good' were written by Rodgers himself and they demonstrate that Hammerstein's job was much harder than it looked. `So Long, Farewell' is just too slight in every way to be worth staging - and it's staged TWICE, no less. And some dialogue that might work on stage plays cheezily on the screen.
On the other hand, the Rodgers and Hammerstein style for once truly suits its subject. Many of the songs are children's songs, nursery songs (`My Favourite Things'), beginner's songs (`Do Re Me'), or simple patriotic folksongs (`Edelweiss'). Even more musically sophisticated things like the title song come off well. Yes, this musical isn't at all innovative, but then Rodgers was never GOOD at innovation - that kind of thing was better left to Gerwshin, Weill, Bernstein, et al.
It's a pity that `The Sound of Music' is the only `epic' musical that many people see - `West Side Story' and `Fiddler on the Roof' are better examples of the genre, and at any rate give a more balanced view of what it's capable of. But I must side with those who say that it's nonetheless a great movie. The script is (mostly) sharp, the languid direction is appropriate and engrossing, and it simply LOOKS good. Besides, like everyone else, I've seen it more times than I can count. Does that mean anything?