Posted on 05/19/2008 9:38:57 PM PDT by fishhound
thanks lol
Yes.
Yes, but I don’t think they want him back; they took his name off a stadium.
Mr. Burns from the Simpson’s.... Excellent.
Do you have a title? Thanks I did not know about it.
I loved it. Was the parking in the mountain available then or was it a cold war military thing.
I liked the funicular up to the castle. The Domo stopped me cold it was so huge.
Thanks for posting that I would have never have guessed the poetic license of the characters taken by the screen writers.
I honestly can’t remember. I turned on German TV one night and it had already started and I never caught the title.
Sorry
I can’t tell you how many times something like that happened to me somewhere far away. LOL
Well, the #1 thing was to entertain. Rodgers & Hammerstein weren’t necessarily going for 100% historical accuracy (witness “The King & I” which is still considered so offensive and lampoonish of King Mongkut that it is STILL banned in Thailand today).
Ernest Lehman, the award-winning writer of the adapted screenplay, took the stage play and along with Mr. Wise, they made it a bit more darker and political for the film (pro-Austrian nationalism, i.e. the defiant singing of “Edelweiss” at the Salzburg Music Festival as a political call to arms to refute the German occupiers). The stage play is considered lighter to my knowledge, and didn’t constantly have the building-up impending sense of doom with the Nazis and the Anschlauss, Austrian-German unification. Although that was in the stage play, it was handled in a less heavy-handed way with the emphasis more on the music.
I believe the biggest worry was that in filming it exactly like the stage play, the film would be absolutely treacle and saccharine, and it needed that extra edge to it, which still makes it work well today, 43 years later.
It’s amazing that with the stepping-up of the dramatic end, and the added Nazi emphasis, that it still revered by families with young children (even if you take out the songs, it would be a fairly decent dramatic film).
A couple other added things. In the film, it appeared that Captain von Trapp was a young man roughly in his 30s (although added a touch of gray to Christopher Plummer’s hair to make him look 40ish), he was nearly 60 at the time they fled Austria. Maria was in her early 30s, so Julie Andrews (at 31) was age appropriate, but Plummer was 2 decades too young for the part. Also, unlike in the film or stage play, which showed them barely back from their honeymoon at the time they had to flee, they had been married for 11 years (!) by that time (47 year old Georg married 22 year old Maria in 1927).
Also, absolutely none of the names of the children in the film or play were the real-life names. The oldest child was not a girl but a son (Rupert), the “Liesl” in the film was Agathe in real life and she wasn’t “16 going on 17” in 1938, she was 25 (and is 95 years old today, unmarried and never had children — it was this story especially of the carefree Liesl with her boyfriend that apparently caused the raucous laughter by the family when it was screened). They also had 9 children by the time they fled, ranging in age from 27 to 7.
Two other interesting facts, the real-life von Trapps didn’t escape from the Salzburg festival (they were indeed ordered to perform for Hitler personally at another location, which never came to pass) and there wasn’t any high drama when they departed Austria with the Nazis in pursuit as in the film. They merely boarded a train and went to Italy, eventually settling in the US. Georg would die in 1947 at 67 in Vermont where they maintain a lodge to this day. 18 years later, the real Maria had a cameo at the beginning of the film where she walks across the screen in the background.
Found this interesting quote, showing that indeed, it was Maria and not Georg who was very intimidating...
Maria Von Trapp: My Own Story. p. 107 “I have a terrible temper, and I had thrown things across the room, yelled at the top of my voice, banged a door... My poor husband, being just the opposite of me, had stood in stunned silence...he just endured it; but then he would be crushed for days... In the meantime I had worked up to the next hurricane. So in the weeks immediately after his death, I relived all these things over and over again...”
A battleaxe apparently who terrified her husband and was over-controlling of her children, especially the daughters. I don’t think a realistic portrayal of the von Trapps would be nearly as endearing. A violent, furniture-hurling Maria ? Sounds more like Hillary Clinton !
I did some quick looking on Wikipedia. The German-Austrian film was made in 1956 and called “Die Trapp-Familie” (”The Trapp Family”).
Just to prevent confusion, I’ll mention that the German title of “The Sound of Music” was “Meine Lieder, Meine Träume” (”My Dreams, My Songs”).
(( Just to prevent confusion, I’ll mention that the German title of “The Sound of Music” was “Meine Lieder, Meine Träume” (”My Dreams, My Songs”). ))
And I caused some confusion anyway. I got that backwards —”Meine Lieder, Meine Träume” is “My Songs, My Dreams.”
So dumm bin ich in Wirklichkeit nicht, ehrlich!
Thanks
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