‘Sound of Music’ Debuted In Chattanooga 50 Years Ago

  • Thursday, July 16, 2015
  • John Shearer
1965 poster promoting movie
1965 poster promoting movie
Fifty years ago, Chattanooga was a city much different from today.
 
Downtown was still full of department and dime stores, as well as restaurants catering mainly to the weekday lunchtime business of workers and shoppers. Also, the Walnut Street Bridge still had automobile traffic.
 
Integration in the local schools was still in the early stages, while Brainerd and Eastgate were the happening suburban places.
 
Amid the popularity of Brainerd, the Brainerd Cinerama at the corner of Brainerd and Germantown roads debuted on July 16, 1965, the first Chattanooga screening of a movie that is still part of the world in 2015 -- “The Sound of Music.”  
 
After the movie based on the popular 1959 Broadway production premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theatre the previous March 2, local residents were no doubt anticipating this movie with the reported great music and good storyline.
 
That was made evident by the fact that the first showing that Friday night was a sellout, and many more people wanted tickets for upcoming shows.
 
“The happiest people in the world are those who have tickets for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” said the Brainerd Cinerama advertisement in the Chattanooga newspaper at the time.
 
The nearly three-hour movie had showings every day at 8 p.m., with additional matinee showings at 2 p.m.
on Wednesday, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.
 
From Sunday through Thursday, the cost of the evening showing was $1.75, while the evening viewing cost $2 on weekends and holidays. The matinee performances cost $1.50 on Wednesday and $1.75 on weekends and holidays.
 
By most accounts, Chattanoogans were not disappointed, and the hills of Chattanooga were alive with the sound of composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s music ringing through their heads afterward. The touching storyline and beautiful scenery were praised, too.
 
“Starring the incomparable Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer as Maria and Capt. Trapp, the film, which was made in and around Salzburg in the Austrian Alps, has just about everything one could ask in breathtaking scenery and enjoyable music,” wrote Chattanooga News-Free Press reviewer R.E. Cooper the next day.
 
He also called the film “one of Hollywood’s major triumphs of taste and imagination,” and, quoting another critic, said, “Everybody but the ultra cynical should find it a wonderful experience in entertainment.”
 
The movie would go on to defeat “Doctor Zhivago” and three other films for Best Picture in 1965, and Robert Wise would win the Best Director Oscar, although Julie Andrews would lose to Julie Christie from “Darling” for Best Actress.
 
Chattanoogans enjoyed the film so much that it would play continuously at the Brainerd Cinerama for an amazing nine months.
 
According to a 2007 online article in chattanoogan.com by Harmon Jolley, the Brainerd Cinerama where “The Sound of Music” played for so long had opened in 1948 and was updated and remodeled into a smaller Cinerama complex in 1962.
 
While Chattanoogans became very familiar with the movie since it played through Feb. 17, 1966, local residents had been familiar for more than 20 years with the Von Trapp family singers on whose lives the movie was loosely based.
 
On Feb. 20, 1945, the real Von Trapp family performed a variety of folk tunes at Memorial Auditorum in an event that was sponsored by Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. While here, they apparently stayed in the Read House.
 
Chattanooga News-Free Press reporter Laura Goforth and the Chattanooga Times’ Vivian Browne– two of numerous female newspaper reporters in Chattanooga during the war years – both interviewed them the day before.
 
The Baroness Von Trapp said they had decided to leave the Salzburg area of Austria in 1938 due to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. However, they could not find another country that wanted them, so they eventually settled in Stowe, Vt., with only $4 in their pockets in an old farmhouse that needed a lot of work. They later opened a folk music camp on some adjacent former Civilian Conservation Corps land.
 
They were quite interested in folk and traditional music, and, according to Maria Von Trapp in the interviews, the hills of Southern Appalachia were literally alive with the sound of music and they were trying to capture it.
 
Their concert featured a variety of songs, from Mozart’s “Ave Maria” (as opposed to “Maria’s Not An Asset to the Abbey”!), to such black spirituals as “Were You There.” They also had a section set aside for black audience members, or “colored people” as one of the 1945 articles phrased it, using the terminology of the time. The show also included some Austrian yodels.
 
By all accounts, their concert was a hit. Ms. Goforth said dignity, charm and good taste predominated and that they “presented a kind of music that for some reason is performed in Chattanooga only occasionally and almost never before the general public.”
 
The Times’ reviewer Helen Richardson said their concert in front of a “fair-sized and appreciative audience” featured the family in peasant costumes among several outfit changes. They also played such forgotten instruments of old as the recorder and the spinet, Ms. Richardson said.
 
On hand for the concert were Baron and Baroness Georg Von Trapp; their conductor, Dr. Franz Wasner, who was a priest; and their seven daughters, Hedwig, Johanna, Agatha, Eleanore, Maria, Martina and Rosmarie. Of their three sons, two – Rupert and Werner -- were in American military service, and the youngest, six-year-old Johannes, was at home.
 
Eleanore, Rosmarie and Johannes were their natural children together, while the others were the baroness’ stepchildren.
 
The children in the movie had other names -- Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta, and Gretl.
 
Also taking place in Chattanooga that week was the world premiere of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) movie, “Keep Your Powder Dry,” at the Tivoli. The film had featured some background shots made at Fort Oglethorpe, where a WAC unit was stationed. Officials were hoping the movie’s stars, Lana Turner and Laraine Day, might attend the premiere, but they were unable to, as was Myrna Loy.
 
While that movie has been mostly forgotten over time, “The Sound of Music” has had much more lasting appeal. This has been due to a great storyline, beautiful scenery and such moving songs as “Climb Every Mountain,” “My Favorite Things” and “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”
 
This movie that is now 50 going on 51 has literally become a golden oldie and a genuine American classic.  
 
Jcshearer2@comcast.net
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