Maria full of grace: "The Sound of Music" at 60

1965's The Sound of Music, that wet Bank Holiday standby, marks its sixtieth anniversary this week with a full theatrical rerelease. It's been quite the journey. A major studio hit - one of the last of its kind - it fell into readily parodied disrepute, only for history to come full circle, much as Robert Wise's camera spends a glacial age hovering over the Mehlweg before alighting on Julie Andrews' singing nun Maria. (Rarely can an opening set-up have better conveyed to the viewer that they're in for a long haul.) The hills are alive once more with the sound of jackboots; to cite opportunistic promoter Max (Richard Haydn), encountering a little of that old SS huffiness, "everybody's cross these days". Can a big, lumbering, three-hour roadshow movie, subsequently boiled down to a single meme - refusenik Captain Christopher Plummer tearing the Nazi flag - be reclaimed as a tool of the resistance, or at the very least workable escapism? (No-one did this for Gigi or My Fair Lady.) You surely know the drill by now: problematic nun-turned-governess Maria brings renewed vivacity to a mausoleum-like household (so far, so Poppins), then helps the Von Trapp children swerve the Anschluss as if the latter were a school trip in danger of going badly awry. The movie remains a singular mix of musical melodrama, Sunday schooling, a semi-radical redirection of Leni Riefenstahl's bergfilms, and a merger of two prominent strands in post-War American filmmaking: the missionary movie (The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The Nun's Story) and the wartime mission movie (anticipating The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare). If it's as boxy as most of its Sixties musical cohorts, it's also socked over with greater chutzpah: the theatre of war is here hijacked by theatre kids who believe the worst thing about the years 1939-45 was the number of shows that didn't and couldn't go on. This show goes on for them. And on. And on.

It nevertheless required some measure of lateral showbusiness thinking, first on Rodgers and Hammerstein's part, then on the part of Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Even knowing the musical facts of the Von Trapp story, it's still some leap to get to "The Lonely Goatherd" and, indeed, doe, a deer, a female deer. The movie is funnier than I remembered it, too: in what now seems an unlikely trial run for the following year's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Lehman (who'd written Sweet Smell of Success a decade before) ensures even the characters intended to represent virtue of a sort have their tetchy and pass-agg moments. (As the lyrics of "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?" go to demonstrate, Maria's sisters have teeth and claws beneath their wimples.) The film's enduring appeal speaks to the apparently universal desire to be told off by someone in a plummy, stage-trained English accent - not necessarily Julie Andrews, though she'll do: playful and mollifying here, a Poppins who won't accept the deathly status quo, doesn't have a magic bag, and has instead armed herself with radical optimism and a capacity for love. Everyone gets it in the neck at some point: the grumpy Captain, contemplating marriage for money and not for love (tsk); the incorrigible children, lined up as if being primed for service (but in whose army?) or the firing squad (you may develop your own preferred order of execution); and, finally, the Nazis themselves, for disrupting everybody's picnics and choir practice. The Sound of Music insists world history would have been very different had someone just put Hitler on the naughty step at a formative moment; you can accuse it of political naivety, but that's also not so different from the premise of a Serious Auteurist Statement like Brady Corbet's more recent, entirely nun-and-songless The Childhood of a Leader. (Or, indeed, from the premise of contemporary world events.)

The minor miracle is that the movie runs three hours, with the Nazis only showing up towards the end of the second, and still it remains broadly entertaining, even stirring. The songs are almost exclusively memorable; their spoken introductions cue that tingle of pleasure you only get when you know something special's next on the jukebox. "My Favourite Things", your gran's "Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part Three)", is great on what we cling to in heavy or stormy weather, even if it all but begs the listener to add the song and the film to their own list of preferred items. Sure, la, a note to follow so is lazy craft (and not a patch on the Half Man Half Biscuit rewrite do re mi so far up your own arse) and "Edelweiss", like "Climb Every Mountain" and "Something Good", is purest sap, but it's also what the film is going for, never more so than in the rousing finale (may you bloom forever) which also doubles as a Lehman-engineered joke about awards ceremonies that run so long one could conceivably flee occupied territory during them without anybody noticing. Setting it all out on studio sets where the Sixties never happened (and WW2 has only just happened) allows Wise to preserve a certain innocent charm and uncomplicated idealism. Believe it or not, at this point we were only two years from Bonnie and Clyde and four from Easy Rider, films that decisively marked the end of post-War American cinema's extended adolescence. Never mind that misleading anniversary, The Sound of Music is eternally sixteen going on seventeen, the true barbarism, beastliness and temptations of the adult world forever just beyond its mountain range. It's not - and was never meant to be - a revolutionary text like If... or La Chinoise, but it is, in the end, not unlike shutting yourself away in a convent during wartime: a safe space, where the worst that can happen is somebody reaching for an acoustic guitar. The show continues to go on.

The Sound of Music is now playing in cinemas nationwide, and streaming via Disney+.