I was not as bored as I had expected to be by The Sound of Music. There is something interesting about any man-made product that approaches perfection of its kind, also about any exercise of supreme professional skill, and this was both: pure, unadulterated kitsch, not a false note, not a whiff of reality; and every detail so carefully worked out, all moving along so smoothly in the familiar tracks, sparing one the slightest effort, all the seeing and feeling and hearing done for one by competent, highly paid professionals. I came out full of goodwill toward all humanity, even Dean Rusk, feeling it was a pretty good old world after all.

The audience for a movie of this kind becomes the lowest common denominator of feeling: a sponge... And the phenomenon at the center of the monetary phenomenon? Julie Andrews, with the clean, scrubbed look and the unyieldingly high spirits; the good sport who makes the best of everything; the girl who’s so unquestionably good that she carries this one dimension like a shield. The perfect, perky schoolgirl, the adorable tomboy, the gawky colt. Sexless, inhumanly happy, the sparkling maid, a mind as clean and well brushed as her teeth...

Yet there was a spider on the valentine: the sinister, unpleasant, archly decadent performance Christopher Plummer gives as the baron, he of the thin, twisted smile — my candidate for the man least likely to be accepted as a hero. Even the monstrously ingenious technicians who made this movie couldn’t put together a convincing mate for Super-Goody Two-Shoes.