Even 50 years after the Hollywood film took the world by storm Austria is still cashing in on its fame

Within months of The Sound Of Music opening in Manhattan on March 2, 1965, the sound of money was clinking not only in Hollywood, but half a world away in Austria, where tourists queue for tours of “SOM” film locations.

Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music PERSONAL OZ Picture: Supplied

Within months of The Sound Of Music opening in Manhattan, the sound of money was clinking not only in Hollywood, but half a world away in Austria, where tourists crammed cobbled streets to queue for bus tours of “SOM” film locations around Salzburg.

Fifty years after Julie Andrews danced across the Alps, Maria still out polls Salzburg son Amadeus Mozart as a tourist attraction, drawing 300,000 visitors a year. And since 2008, thousands have slept beneath a photograph of Maria in a hotel at the original von Trapp family home, on the city’s south-eastern outskirts and nowhere near the lakeside schloss featured in the movie.

The outside view of a former home of the von Trapp family, in Salzburg, Austria, has been made into a hotel where tourists can sleep beneath a photograph of Maria. Picture: AP

After standing ovations at previews in Minneapolis and Tulsa, the film story of the von Trapp family opened at the Rivoli Theatre in New York on March 2, 1965. Panned by critics as “romantic nonsense and sentiment”, the panoramic movie with its singalong soundtrack became a favourite for millions. It outsold 1939 cinema release Gone With The Wind to claim box-office records until 1972, toppled by The Godfather.

Although events revolve around a large, musical family fleeing Nazi annexation of Austria, it was German filmmakers who were the first to recognise the entertainment value of former nun and governess Maria von Trapp’s autobiographical Story Of The Trapp Family Singers, published in 1948.

Almost a decade before Twentieth Century Fox studios recruited West Side Story (1961) director Robert Wise to film a romanticised version of the Trapp story, German actress Ruth Leuwerick gave Maria a childlike exuberance in Die Trapp Familie (1956).

Ruth Leuwerik as Maria with the children in German film Die Trapp Familie (1956).

It was also filmed on location in Salzburg, with opening scenes shot at the 8th century Nonnberg Nunnery where Leuwerick’s Maria slides down a stone banister as she rushes to teach a class. Leuwerick, who strongly resembled Andrews, played opposite handsome blond Hans Holt as taciturn widower Baron Georg Trapp. Instead of Do-Re-Mi and Edelweiss, his seven children performed folk tunes, madrigals and classical chorales such as Innsbruck, Ich Muss Dich Lassens (Innsbruck, I Must Leave You).

Die Trapp Familie and its sequel, Die Trapp Familie in Amerika (1958), became the most popular post-war German film releases. Paramount Pictures purchased US film rights in 1956, planning an English-language version with Audrey Hepburn cast as Maria.

When the studio dropped its option, director Vincent Donehue proposed the story as a stage musical for Mary Martin, with a stage play written by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who approached composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to write one signature song. The composers suggested their composition would not sit comfortably with traditional Austrian folk songs and offered to write a score for the entire production.

Maria and Georg von Trapp with his seven children performing as The Trapp Family Singers (circa mid-1930s).

The Sound Of Music stage show opened on November 16, 1959, at New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Although panned by critics as a “marsh of treacle” and “Austrian sugar icing an inch thick”, it ran on Broadway for 1443 performances and won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

In June 1960, Twentieth Century Fox purchased film rights to the Broadway musical for $1.25 million (about $9,964,848) and rights to distribute the two German films in the US. Fox combined the German films and dubbed them in English as a single 106-minute film, The Trapp Family (1961).

Actor Julie Andrews in the 1965 film The Sound Of Music. Picture: Supplied

Filming a Hollywood version ran behind schedule and came in over budget at $8.2 million. After the movie’s gala opening, New York critics noted “Wise used his cameras to set a magnificently graphic scene in and around the actual city of Salzburg ... he zooms over the snow-capped peaks and down into the green and ochre region, just as he zoomed down into New York’s crowded streets in his memorable film of West Side Story”, but complained he staged the movie “in a cosy-cum-corny fashion”.

The movie defied the critics to score 10 Academy Award nominations in 1966, taking out Best Picture and Best Director among several others.

By the time of Maria von Trapp’s death at age 82 in 1987, “SOM” had grossed $286,214,286 at the box office. Yet despite her reputation as a “loud and forceful” woman who secured the Trapp’s fortunes in America, the family received little from either play or movie revenues.

Andrews with some of the children in scene from The Sound of Music. Picture: Supplied

Originally published as Even 50 years after the Hollywood film took the world by storm Austria is still cashing in on its fame