It is all too easy to knock Robert ‘Wise’s enormously successful screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical hit, what with singing nuns and a kind-of-cute clutch of seven kids coping with the double trouble of an absurdly disciplinarian widower father and the rise of the Nazi regime in 1930s Salzburg. But one should never underestimate the effectiveness of the lead performances—Julie Andrews as the eccentrically vivacious nun-turned-governess and Christopher Plummer as the strict, buttoned-up patriarch whose heart she melts. There is also the unsentimental precision of Ernest Lehman’s script (he did, after all, also work on Sweet Smell of Success [1957] and North by Northwest [1959]), and the solid, unshowy expertise of Wise’s direction, in which his editor’s sensitivity to structure, rhythm, and rhyming juxtapositions is always evident.
That exhilarating opening helicopter shot across the mountaintops—finally alighting on Andrews running exuberantly as she bursts into “The hills are alive” may now seem hackneyed, but that’s only because its efficiency in establishing mood (and, indeed, meaning, since The Sound of Music is a film in which music and the life force are inextricably linked) has meant that it’s been much imitated. And let us not forget: like it or not, those tunes really are unforgettable. —Geoff Andrew (1001)

Some people may sneer at this 1965 musical, but the truth is the film has earned its status as a perennially watchable romantic-drama, largely on the strength of a fun story and chemistry between stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Veteran filmmaker Robert Wise ("The Day the Earth Stood Still") mostly stays out of the way of the film's appealing elements, which include a based-on-fact tale of Austria's von Trapp family, who fled their Nazi-occupied country in 1938. Andrews is delightful and even fascinating as Maria, who sheds her tomboyish ways as a novice nun to accept the mantle of adulthood, becoming matron of the motherless von Trapp clan. Plummer is matinee-idol handsome and gives a smart performance to boot, and the cast of young people and kids who make up the singing von Trapp children make a strong impression. Based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, the score includes such winners as "Maria" and the future John Coltrane hit "My Favourite Things." "—Tom Keogh, Amazon.com"