March 2, 1965—
The Sound of Music premiered in
New York, its first step toward winning five Academy Awards (including Best
Picture) and becoming the highest-grossing entrant in perhaps the best-loved
Hollywood genre since sound came to motion pictures: the musical. Nobody could
foresee that a mere three years later, the same popular star and respected
director primarily responsible for the film would be involved in another
musical that flopped so disastrously that it foretold the decline of the entire
form.
Julie Andrews’ appearance at the Academy Awards eight days ago was
intended to remind a worldwide audience not just of one film’s 50th
anniversary, but of the way that cinema in general has become a marker in our
lives—whether one saw the movie originally on the big screen, in one of the newer
video formats, or—as has been occurring with greater frequency in recent
years—as a movie that has become a Christmas mainstay on TV, in much the same
way that It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story has become.
But, for me anyway, what the beloved star’s
appearance did was to reveal the distance has grown between not
only the movie musical of yesterday vs. the one of today, but alsothe even
greater distance that has grown between the Best Picture of the mid-Sixties and
the one crowned by Hollywood last week.
Onstage at the same Oscar ceremony as Ms. Andrews
was John Travolta. Although the
actor has become a figure of some amusement these last few years (in no small
part because of his Scientology connections, a hairstyle suspiciously
resembling a toupee, and the mangling of Idina Menzel’s name on the show a year
ago), he remains, in his way, a crucial figure in the industry’s development, a
symbol of how the movie musical morphed into something far different from what
Ms. Andrews and her Sound of Music director, Robert Wise, could have imagined.
When the makers of The Sound of Music took home their Oscar gold, it was the third
time in five years that Best Picture honors had gone to a musical—and a
big-budget one, at that. (The prior winners had been West Side Story, in 1961, and My
Fair Lady in 1964.) But already, in 1964, Richard Lester had paved the way
for an entirely different form of cinematic music-making with his film about
The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night.
The Fab Four, instead of breaking into song on a
moment’s notice anywhere, did so in their debut film in a more realistic
setting: as part of one of their concerts. Onscreen as well as on vinyl, they
were upending convention. They were young and filled with irreverence toward
The Establishment—including the musical one.
Nobody represented the Musical Establishment of the
mid-Sixties the way that Richard Rodgers,
the “organization man of American musical theater” (critic David Hadju’s words), did.
Even with the death of his second principal collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II (Lorenz Hart had been the first),
at the start of the decade, he continued to appear unstoppable—with the soundtracks of his Broadway shows and their film
adaptations landing on the lists of the bestselling music LPs. For the film version of The Sound of Music, he contributed two
new songs, “I Have Confidence” and “Something Good.”
Almost as extraordinary a businessman as music man,
Rodgers saw this last collaboration of his with Hammerstein reap box-office
gold as well, to the point that some industry wits called the movie The Sound of Money. Others, more
cynical, gagged on the sentiment celebrated unapologetically here—including no
less than the film’s co-star, Christopher Plummer, who nicknamed it “The Sound
of Mucus.” Actor Doug McClure was equally vehement about its gooeyness:
“Watching The Sound of Music is like
being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.”
The same could not be said for Saturday Night Fever. Its original R-rated version not only employed the rough
language of a still-unformed Brooklyn youth and his friends, but also shots of a stripper and a rape—hardly
the type of scenes involving a young governess aspiring to become a nun.
More to the point, Saturday Night Fever represented a break from The Sound of Music and its ilk by returning the movie musical to
its origins, then thrusting it forward into new territory. Unlike The Sound of Music and other
libretto-centric musicals, its strong suit was dance, which lent itself to
movement—in that sense, if no other, a return to the work of Fred Astaire and
Gene Kelly.
At the same time, the soundtrack to the movie had
become just as important as the movie. Each song (in this case, largely
by the Bee Gees) became a phenomenon by itself.
Lastly, Saturday
Night Fever, with a low budget, came out of nowhere, spawning a whole
new genre of dance/soundtrack musicals, including another Travolta film, Urban Cowboy (1980), Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984) and Dirty
Dancing (1987).
The lessons of those films—stay small and stay
hungry—were lost on Hollywood in the Sixties. The Sound of Music had rescued its studio, Twentieth Century Fox,
from the financial ruin caused just a couple of years earlier by Cleopatra. But, by repeating the formula
used by its Oscar winner—on-location shooting, spare-no-expense budgets, and stories missing the originality and zest
of Kelly’s classic 1950s musicals like Singing in the Rain—it set itself up for
failure repeatedly.
One after another traditional musical tanked for the studio--Doctor Doolittle and Hello, Dolly!--and other studios fared little better.
The most shocking failure may have involved Star!,
in which Andrews, directed by Wise, tackled the role of actress Gertrude
Lawrence. It was nearly as long as The Sound
of Music, and even outdid My Fair
Lady in the size of its wardrobe department—125 costume changes for Ms. Andrews, a
record for an actress in one film at the time.
While creating a host of imitators, then, The Sound of Music ensured that the traditional
music would lie dormant for decades, until Chicago
partly revived the form a decade ago, albeit in radically reduced number.
Moreover, its appeal to family audiences would
increasingly find no counterpart in mainstream Hollywood—at least, in anything other than animated films. New, edgier filmmakers would find
footholds in Tinseltown and vote for fare with less broad-based appeal. The
result: the triumph on Oscar night of The
Birdman, a film with nowhere near the grosses that The Sound of Music had enjoyed. In fact, none of the Best Picture nominees, with the exception of American Sniper, could be termed a blockbuster--and, in its consistently downbeat mood, that was nothing like the family-friendly, hope-as-high-as-the-Alps mood of Julie Andrews' triumph 50 years before.
