The miracle of Maria: After 60 years, the epic scope of The Sound of Music still can’t contain Julie Andrews
U2’s immense postmodern ZOO TV tour took place between February 1992 and December 1993. It was an intense, pretentious, conceptual rock music masterpiece. All the technological elements in the ZOO TV show were elevated, the quality of the music was first-rate — yet the performers themselves were in a degree of competition with the other elements of the huge production. As the band’s lead guitarist, the Edge, described:
It’s almost the ZOO TV production fighting for the attention of the audience with the band. That makes us kick a bit harder.
The context U2 had created led to an intentional instability in the ZOO TV show. This dynamic is not simply the challenge of maintaining a strong human element in a technically ambitious production. It is about artistic and star power competing with craft and technology.
Singer Bono of Irish rock band U2 performs on their ZOO TV tour at Estadio Jose Alvalade in Lisbon, Portugal, on 15 May 1993. (Photo by Martyn Goodacre / Getty Images)
Is there any film that we can compare to ZOO TV’s dynamic instability? The tours de force of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s and the MCU’s Infinity Saga (2008–2019) successfully preserved meaningful human performances from their strong ensemble casts in the middle of the most advanced cinematic special effects to date. But these films do not offer roles of sufficient centrality to provide a competing power base within the films themselves — perhaps with the exception of Robert Downey, Jr’s sympathetic portrayal of Tony Stark.
None of these compares to the tug-of-war at the centre of the ZOO TV tour. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity comes closer — its masterful special effects undeniably orbit around Sandra Bullock’s performance. Perhaps Matt Damon in Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) or Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) or even Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films (2003–2004) capture something of the ZOO TV volatility in the confrontation of the artistry of the star with the artistry of the spectacle?
To my mind, it is the performance of Julie Andrews in Robert Wise’s 1965 adaptation of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music — which was released in Australia 60 years ago this week — that best fits the bill.
Julie Andrews portrays Maria in an opening scene from the 1965 film “The Sound of Music” — the winner of 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. (Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
The whole of this nearly-three-hour Oscar-winning film is such a barrage of sound and visuals, right from the very opening helicopter shot flex of Andrews singing on the Untersberg mountain. Everything in the film is so big, so widescreen, so full colour, so bombastic — all-singing and all-dancing. But not for one moment do we lose sight of Maria.
The song “Do-Re-Mi” single-handedly created the Salzburg tourism industry for the last half century with its frolic through the gardens and fountains of the Austrian city. We spend time gaping at the lavish Frohnburg palace (used for the Von Trapp Villa), the eighth-century Nonnberg Abbey, and the seventeenth-century Felsenreitschule theatre, where the family’s final performance and escape is staged. And yet Julie Andrews towers over it all.
The actors playing members of the Von Trapp family in a promotional image for “The Sound of Music”. Left to right: Nicholas Hammond as Friedrich, Kym Karath as Gretl, Angela Cartwright as Brigitta, Julie Andrews as Maria, Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp, Charmian Carr as Liesl, Heather Menzies as Louisa, Debbie Turner as Marta and Duane Chase as Kurt. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)
This was the second time in a row that Julie Andrews had accomplished this remarkable feat. In 1964 she won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Mary Poppins — in its own right, a triumph in the face of all manner of musical, animated and storytelling wizardry. It is as if the immensity of these two films were required to bring out the full glory of Julie Andrews. Put otherwise, she needed to be thrown into the fraught ZOO TVdynamic.
The songs that populate The Sound of Music are all great — and over half of those are performed by Julie Andrews. Yes “Maria”, “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” and “So Long, Farewell” are tremendous fun. Yes, “Edelweiss” provides one or two tear-jerker moments and left a multi-generational legacy of mistaken belief about the Austrian national anthem. (The story goes that Christopher Plummer, who plays Captain Von Trapp, initially insisted on doing his own singing — “How hard can it be, right?” — until he was given a chance to listen back to the recordings. Then he submitted to dubbing.) And, yes, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” is an absolute banger. (Although an accomplished singer in her own right, the ageing Peggy Wood, as the Reverend Mother Abbess, was unable to perform the song for the film.) Yet facing off against this impressive set list and their accompanying cinematic moments, they are nothing but the support act to Andrews’s own songs.
Julie Andrews as the novice nun Maria in “The Sound of Music”. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)
Julie Andrews is alone for “I Have Confidence”, swinging wildly from childish vulnerability to spiritual angst to slapstick comedy to roaring resolve. She owns the scenery, owns the song, owns the screen. Halfway through the film, she sings along with the Von Trapp children and a gorgeous and elaborate puppet show in the manic but maternal performance of “Lonely Goatherd”. Even here, up against a technically demanding vocal part and a much more complex scene, Andrews glows and pulses with energy. No matter what she’s up against, it always makes her kick a bit harder.
Thematically, Andrews comes up against monastic devotion to Jesus Christ and the pursuit of one’s true vocation, grief and parenthood, true love and the saucy Baroness Schraeder (Eleanor Parker), patriotism and the Third Reich. And she wins against them all. Julie Andrews’s performance is bigger than the Baroness, the Nazis and the Benedictine Order.
Acting as the governess, Julie Andrews as Maria sings to her charges while sitting in a pasture. (Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images)
The rest of the cast are everything they need to be, and yet none of them come close to competing with Andrews’s Maria. Indeed, Peggy Wood was the only other cast member nominated for an award for the film — receiving both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress in her role as Mother Abbess. No one comes near Julie Andrews. It is her against the entirety of the rest of the film.
Julie Andrews’s Maria is devout, eccentric, comical, forthright, tender, wry, panicked, sensuous, naïve, authoritative. In The Sound of Music, she is a balancing superpower, an alternative energy source, a second sun.
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One of the categories addressed in every episode of film podcast The Rewatchables is “Who won the movie?” It could be the director, the screenwriter, an actor, a location. Usually, a film has one very clear winner. Without a doubt Julie Andrews won The Sound of Music. She won it in a heightened contest with cinematic spectacle that only strengthens the gravitational pull of the film as a whole, like a binary star system.
A case could be made that — despite losing the Academy Award for Best Actress to Julie Christie for Darling — Julie Andrews won moviesas a whole in 1964 and 1965. To put it simply, Julie Andrews is gigantic.
Michael James is a novelist and writer. His work has appeared in Overland, époque e-zine, The Suburban Review, Belle Ombre and The Smart Set. He is currently working on his fourth novel.