The Sound of Music turns 60: Hit movie saved Fox but drunken star Christopher Plummer hated it

It might surprise fans to learn that the movie “The Sound of Music,” which turned 60 years old on March 2, was not one of the critics’ favorite things when it hit theaters in 1965.Pauline Kael called the wholesome, Austria-set musical starring Julie Andrews a “sugar-coated lie” in a pan review that is said to have gotten her fired from McCall magazine.The New York Times boiled down the film with songs by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to “romantic nonsense and sentiment.” The Post was kinder, declaring the story “indestructibly appealing.” But critic Archer Winsten still had his gripes about how the real Trapp family history was “reorganized to ‘musical’ dimensions.” None of their groans mattered.The flick climbed ev’ry mountain: the box office, the Academy Awards and the hearts and minds of multiple generations.“The Sound of Music” stands among the most popular films ever made, won the Oscar for Best Picture and is the sixth highest-grossing movie of all time when sales are adjusted for inflation.Getting it to the screen, however, was a struggle.In the early 1960s, 20th Century Fox was being walloped by the hugely expensive debacle that was “Cleopatra” starring Elizabeth Taylor.Tom Santopietro writes in his book “The Sound The Sound of Music Story: How A Beguiling Young Novice, A Handsome Austrian Captain, and Ten Singing von Trapp Children Inspired the Most Beloved Film of All Time” that the studio was on the verge of bankruptcy from the historical epic. “Fox lost $15 million on actual film production, a then astronomical sum that forced the company to sell both stock and real estate,” he writes.

“Chairman Spyros Skouras sold off the studio’s fabled and valuable 260-acre back lot to make up the cash shortfall.” Skouras was fired before “Cleopatra” was even released, and Fox rehired the old head of production Darryl F.Zanuck.

The sharp vet knew religious stories sell, even merely adequate ones.“T...