How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Rating: 6/10 (3 April 2005)

The greatest, best-known, most irritating and over-rated screen musical of all time - that's Rodgers and Hammerstein's last collaboration, 'The Sound of Music'. Julie Andrews is Maria, appearing on film again after her Oscar-winning triumph as Mary Poppins and her stage successes as Guinivere in Camelot and Eliza in My Fair Lady. Maria on stage had been the peerless Mary Martin, not quite as sugary as Andrews, but who could argue with this sweet-voiced screen version? Maria is in a convent but she isn't suitable material for a bride of Christ. The Mother Abbess (Peggy Wood, here I think dubbed for her rendition of 'Climb Every Mountain', considering her pure soprano years earlier) sends Maria out into the world to take charge of the Von Trapp children. Their father, the starchy Captain (Christopher Plummer) rules his household with perfect timing and has little love to give to his children - Maria is about to bring a ray of sunshine into their life.
You know the big songs - 'Doh Ray Mi' (which seems to go on forever), 'The Lonely Goatherd' (while the children work with a puppet theatre), 'Sixteen Going On Seventeen' (lovely performances in a summer house from Charmian Carr as Liesl and Daniel Truhitte as Rolfe), and, of course, Julie Andrews spinning around a grassy hill singing the title song.
Maria and the Von Trapps get caught in the second world war and have to ship out from the clutches of the Nazis pretty quickly. With the sugary musical backdrop to this war-torn drama stopping it working, this section of the film is sluggish in comparison to the joy of 'My Favourite Things'.