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On Pointe wrote:

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I only intended to watch the opening of Sound of Music and of course,  for the umpteenth time,  I watched it to the end.  The great mystery is why this film that has no Christmas scenes or even winter scenes,  has somehow become associated with Christmas?  There are a couple of wintry lines in the song My Favorite Things,  but that's it.  Otherwise it has everything - nuns,  Nazis,  big opulent house,  big opulent wedding,  cute blond kids in sailor suits.  Maybe Rodgers and Hammerstein thought adding  a Christmas tree would be over the top.

Don't forget the big opulent ball and the big opulent Alps. Christopher Plummer said filming in Salzburg was like being trapped in a Hallmark card.

Wikipedia tells me that ABC has been airing TSOM on a Sunday just before Christmas since 2002, so maybe that’s it.  I’m guessing it’s a good time to air it since ratings are not what they once were.  Evidently the BBC also airs it around Christmas.

Fun fact from Wiki:  “The film was also intended to be part of the BBC's programming during the outbreak of nuclear war.”

One hazard of watching the movie is that several of the songs are among the most insistent earworms ever written. Damned if I could get “My Favorite Things” and “The Lonely Goatherd” out of my head all week. Another chorus of “Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo” and I was going to throw myself out a window.

I really do need to get around to seeing “The Holiday,” Petra, thank you for the reminder.

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When I visited Salzburg many years ago in December, my hotel  had one channel devoted to round-the-clock showings of The Sound of Music. But I was told that when the film came out, locals wondered what the American tourists were so excited about!  Locals knew nothing about the stage show or the film. Now it's a major tourist attraction, of course, especially looking for all the sites in the movie used for filming.

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7 hours ago, dirac said:

One hazard of watching the movie is that several of the songs are among the most insistent earworms ever written. Damned if I could get “My Favorite Things” ... out of my head all week.

That's why John Coltrane's version exists – as an exorcism of sorts.

I'm reading a book of Adalbert Stifter's short stories, just reissued by NYRB, which may in a way be a Christmas movie / TSOM substitute. They take place in the mountains or unpopulated countryside, there's snow and significant weather, they move slowly and describe the landscapes they move through in meticulous detail.  "Limestone," about a surveyor taking the measure of the geology of a poor and remote part of the country, was an influence on Kafka as he was describing the adventures of the surveryor K in "The Castle." I just finished Anuk Arudpragasam's finely crafted, Stifter-paced "A Passage North" and have started up "Gravel Heart" by Nobel prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnash, which seems to have been rushed back into publication on paper stock just this side of newsprint. Both are about childhood homes and homecomings which I guess Christmas narratives are about. 

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I quite like the Coltrane version of the song, although Rodgers was known to have mixed feelings about jazz (and swing) musicians' renderings of his songs (cf. "I Like to Recognize the Tune"). However, I don't think Coltrane so much buries the tune but enlarges it and upon it.

I had never heard of Stifter before your post, so thank you. Oddly, your description reminds me of the giant aerial shots of the landscape (with snow, without snow) that begin TSOM  -- a device Wise and his scenarist, Ernest Lehman, had used a few years earlier for West Side Story, but Lehman thought it was good for a second visit to the well. At the end of the movie the von Trapps elude their (admittedly paper tiger) Nazis by escaping across the same spectacular landscape.

 

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