The Sound of Music (film)
Critical response

No one is comfortable with an excess of hearts and flowers, but there is no valid reason for hiding honest emotion. This has always been a major element in the theatre, and it's my conviction that anyone who can't, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted.

Richard Rodgers

The film had its opening premiere on March 2, 1965, at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. Initial reviews were mixed. Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times, criticized the film's "romantic nonsense and sentiment", the children's "artificial roles", and Robert Wise's "cosy-cum-corny" direction. Judith Crist, in a biting review in the New York Herald Tribune, dismissed the film as "icky sticky" and designed for "the five to seven set and their mommies". In her review for McCall's magazine, Pauline Kael called the film "the sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat", and that audiences have "turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs." Wise later recalled, "The East Coast, intellectual papers and magazines destroyed us, but the local papers and the trades gave us great reviews". Indeed, reviewers such as Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "three hours of visual and vocal brilliance", and Variety called it "a warmly-pulsating, captivating drama set to the most imaginative use of the lilting R-H tunes, magnificently mounted and with a brilliant cast". The "wildly mixed film reviews" reflected the critical response to the stage musical, according to The Oxford Companion to the American Musical. After its Los Angeles premiere on March 10, The Sound of Music opened in 131 theaters in the United States, including a limited number of roadshow events. After four weeks, it became the number-one box office film in the country and held that position for thirty out of the next forty-three weeks in 1965. The original theatrical release of the film in America lasted four and a half years.

A few months after its United States release, The Sound of Music opened in 261 theaters in other countries, the first American film to be completely dubbed in a foreign language, both dialogue and music. The German, French, Italian, and Spanish versions were completely dubbed, the Japanese version had Japanese dialogue with English songs, and other versions were released with foreign subtitles. The film was a popular success in every country it opened in, except the two countries where the story originated, Austria and Germany.

In these two countries, the film had to compete with the much-loved Die Trapp-Familie (1956), which provided the original inspiration for the Broadway musical, and its sequel Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958); both films are still widely popular in German-speaking Europe and considered the authoritative von Trapp story. Austrians took exception to the liberties taken by the filmmakers with regard to the costumes, which did not reflect the traditional style and the replacement of traditional Austrian folk songs with Broadway show tunes. The film's Nazi theme was especially unpopular in Germany, where the Munich branch manager for 20th Century-Fox approved the unauthorized cutting of the entire third act of the film following the wedding sequence—the scenes showing Salzburg following the Anschluss. Robert Wise and the studio intervened, the original film was restored, and the branch manager was fired.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Sound of Music holds an approval rating of 83% based on 77 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Unapologetically sweet and maybe even a little corny, The Sound of Music will win over all but the most cynical filmgoers with its classic songs and irresistible warmth." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 63 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
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