La familia Trapp

Just when everybody thought that German post-war cinema was on the downward hill financially, along came this warm, often tender, sometimes touching, colorful hit of gargantuan proportions.

Produced on the lavish side, with Germany's top box-office attraction, regal Ruth Leuwerik in the lead, 'Die Trapp Familie' broke all records, second only to 'Schwarzwaldmaedel' as Germany's most popular Heimatfilm and easily became the biggest hit in Miss Leuwerik's chain of successes.

Largely forgotten today, the pic holds up quite well. The story is not too exciting, there's nothing that might offend blue-noses and all takes place against an pastoral background of green meadows and snow-capped mountains.

Ruth Leuwerik does what she can with the wafer-thin part and her warmth and natural beauty prevent the whole thing form being too syrupy.

Interesting sideline: while 'The Sound of Music', a lavish musical version of the same story, broke box-office records in 1965 all over the world, it flopped miserably in Germany and Austria, still faithful to 'Die Trapp Familie'.

This film, being the prototype of the more famous Sound of Music, naturally invites comparisons. The most glaring differences are the faster pace, lack of character development, lack of drama and expansion of the New York storyline. While there is nothing really wrong with this film, it doesn't use the story to its full potential and feels like it is being too straightforward and fast-paced, never slowing down to give the viewer a better impression of the setting, characters, music and emotion.

Romantic story of the lively young novice who falls in love with the Baron and his children. Then, due to the war, they all hit off to America to pursue their singing career. Different from the Julie Andrews version but I can`t say that it is better !

No, this does not come across as a poor man's version of The Sound of Music. It was the precursor of it by almost ten years, not strictly a musical as such, although naturally full of music, and the most successful film in the (struggling) West German cinema of the 50's.

The version I saw was clearly an amalgam of this one and its less-popular sequel The Trapp Family in America, merged into a standard 100-minute running time, dubbed in English, with many scenes inevitably cut - and it shows. But it is closer to the true family history than the more famous musical, where they were setting out to 'climb every mountain' straight into Mussolini's Italy! It accurately shows the Von Trapps having to flee the country because they'd gone bankrupt, for reasons to do with the 1938 German annexation of Austria. And Germany's top star Ruth Leuwerik makes a more realistic Maria than Julie Andrews ever did, a suitable mix of glamour and grit that would carry her team across the States if it killed her. Equally, Hans Holt as the Baron manages to carry conviction in the part without looking quite such a cad as Christopher Plummer.

The film ends with a nice touch, as they start building a new family home in the mountains in Vermont, all singing as they go!

This is the film that started it all and via the musical gave us the film "The Sound of Music". This is the film of which Baroness Von Trapp after its premiere said: "Nothing is true, but it is wonderful". Well, wonderful it is not, but it ìs a fairly well-made, ditto scripted and entertaining film about Maria who would become Baroness Von Trapp. Ruth Leuwerik, who always would blossom under Liebeneiner's direction, is convincing as Maria and Hans Holt is the perfect Baron Von Trapp. Fine set design and as usual very good music by Franz Grothe.

It is not as saccharin as "The Sound of Music", and it should be considered a typical product of its time with its optimistic "to every problem there is a solution" premise; it may be that this premise was in the minds of the makers rather than the life of the Von Trapps. As such it was a modern fairy tale for German 50's audience with Maria as the fairy-godmother; this role is emphasized by the last shot of the film in which Maria looks straight at the viewer and says "Gute Nacht" as a kind of blessing.

Liebeneiner directs with light touch and knows how to tell the story economically, but neither he nor the scriptwriter seems very at ease in dealing with the thread of Nazism and the subsequent 1938 Anschluß of Austria; not surprising however as Liebeneiner could not have had a clear conscience on the matter. The script suggests that after their escape from Austria the Von Trapps went straight to the USA, while in fact they toured Europe and went to the USA in 1939 for an American tour; the trouble with the immigration never existed.

The film is loosely based on the memories of Maria Von Trapp, which she published in 1947; the family had already stopped with their singing. The story goes that the producer's agent lead Maria to believe that German law forbid payment of royalties to foreigners. Later she found out that this was not true, after which she received a lump sum of $ 9.000,--!. The story of the film (and its sequel "Die Trapp Familie in Amerika") was sold to Broadway producer Richard Halliday and the rest is history.