#nonnberg

[emvidal]

[paralleljulieverse]

The Good Sisters of The Sound of Music

(in honour of National Catholic Sisters Week, March 8-14)

It’s easy to dismiss the nuns of The Sound of Music as part of what Bosley Crowther sardonically calls the film’s “cheerful abundance of kirche-küche-kinder sentiment” ( X-1). From the moment of the film’s release in 1965, commentators have taken thinly-veiled delight in lampooning the ‘singing sisters of Nonnberg’ as, variously,  “twittering nuns” (Crowther, X-1), “prancing nuns” (Freund, 8B), “silly stereotyped nuns” (Walsh, 375), “great big super-screen nuns” (Crist, 22) and, even, “twinkling nuns…sing[ing] their wimples off” (Tynan, 25). It’s easy…but this patronising derision does a great disservice to the significant role played by the nuns –– and the female actors who portrayed them –– in the extraordinary power and enduring appeal of The Sound of Music.

Character

Though they are certainly called to embody clearly defined 'types' –– the wise Abbess, the cantankerous Sister, the kindly Sister, etcetera –– the nuns in The Sound of Music are a dynamic and deftly crafted element of the film’s textual economy. Part Greek chorus, part Proppian helper, part comic relief, the nuns generate and respond to core plot developments, while accenting key emotional themes. The whole narrative arc of The Sound of Music effectively starts and ends with the nuns and they serve throughout as enabling structural agents. They are the ones who introduce and define Maria as protagonist –– quite literally, with their litany of competing attributes cum grievances that is “a problem like Maria” –– and they are the ones to whom Maria returns at key junctures throughout her narrative journey, including most importantly at film’s close where the nuns orchestrate the von Trapp’s escape to freedom and the triumphant plenitude of a celestial musical ending.

The Mother Abbess is particularly important in this respect. In narratological terms, she is the classic mentor of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the one who calls the hero(ine) to adventure and initiates her quest. True to the symbolic maternity of her title, the Mother Abbess issues Maria into the world, exhorting her “to live the life you were born to live”, and enabling the self-actualisation of her bildungsroman journey. She is also one of a long line of strong senior women positioned in this role in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. Like Nettie Fowler in Carousel, Lady Thiang in The King and I, and Bloody Mary in South Pacific, the Mother Abbess is the sagacious ‘Earth Mother’ who understands and guides, delivering the musical’s key emotional anthem in a showstopping semi-operatic contralto (Mordden, 204).  

That it is an exclusively female cast of characters performing these vital narrative functions highlights The Sound of Music’s distinctive female-centred form. Richard Dyer (1992) argues that, with its focus on “specifically female problems and solutions” (46) and its celebration of “women’s…endurance, self-sacrifice and hope” (59), The Sound of Music owes as much, if not more, to the gynocentric traditions of “the woman’s film” as to the heterosexual romance plots of the musical. It’s no doubt part of the reason The Sound of Music has attracted such a strong and devoted female audience over the years  –– and, conversely, proved less inviting to (many) straight men –– as its “utopian fantasy of a feminine author(is)ed world” signals “an important space for women to cathect feelings and desires that can only be defined as prototypically feminist” (Farmer, 123; see also: Kemp, 57ff;  Wolf, 203ff).

History 

It is worth highlighting historical context here and how the film’s imaging of nuns resonated deeply with the surrounding zeitgeist. When The Sound of Music came out in 1965 it was in the midst of an unprecedented period of wholesale social change, the effects of which are still being processed half a century later (Marwick, 1998). Second wave feminism was challenging traditional systems of patriarchal power, decolonisation and civil rights movements were dismantling racial and national hierarchies, and anti-authoritarian youth cultures were rebelling against institutionalised orthodoxies of all stripes. There was hardly an aspect of social, political and personal life untouched by the era’s ferment of sweeping protest and change. 

Even the Catholic Church underwent its own seismic revolution. In 1962, Pope John XXIII convened the historic Second Vatican Council, an intensive three year review designed to “open the windows of the church” and bring Catholicism more in line with the conditions and needs of the modern world (Wilde, 2007). Of the myriad changes introduced by Vatican II, one of the most notable, if because most visible, was the structural revision of religious orders. Formerly cloistered communities were opened up and male and female religious were directed to become more actively engaged with their respective societies. They were also encouraged to modernise or even do away with habits and other aesthetic markers of religious differentiation. “Following the Council,” writes historian Louise O’Reilly (2013), nuns “become the new thing in the modern church” and a manifest symbol of the revolutionary changes of Vatican II and the broader fabric of postwar sociocultural revision of which it was a part (2).

With its story of a novice moving from the cloister to the outside world and its generalised focus on nuns exercising personal and social agency, The Sound of Music emblematised –– or, at the very least, resonated with –– this historical milieu of religious and social transformation. Indeed, it’s instructive that, in deeply Catholic Latin America, The Sound of Music was released under the title of La novicia rebelde or The Rebellious Novice (Hirsch, 180). 

The Sound of Music was not an isolated case in this respect. From hit films like The Nun’s Story (1959), Lilies of the Field (1963) and The Trouble with Angels (1966), TV sitcoms like The Flying Nun (1967-70) to real-life figures such as Soeur Sourire, the popularly dubbed ‘Singing Nun’, who became an unlikely global pop star with her chart-topping single, “Dominique”, the media landscape of the 1960s was awash with images of nuns in the throes of social change. The phenomenal success of The Sound of Music intensified the trend exponentially with Hollywood studios reportedly green-lighting upwards of nine nun-themed films in 1965 alone (Thomas, 28; “It Has to Be,” 32).

Rebecca Sullivan (2005) argues that this 1960s cultural fascination with nuns –– she calls it, “nun culture” –– was both symptom and response to the era’s rapidly transforming social and sexual politics. It is no mere coincidence, she asserts, that “the cultural presence of the nun comes into prominence at the same time as what is generally termed the sexual revolution” (6). While the fact can and has been interpreted as a reactionary pushback –– a shellshocked mainstream seeking nostalgic refuge in the “ultimate virgins” –– Sullivan suggests a more complex reading with "nun culture” viewed  “as a kind of signifier of burgeoning yet manageable feminist consciousness” (10). The nuns of 60s media culture were obviously not direct agents of the sexual revolution but they symbolically played out “the sexual-social ferment of the times” (6). With “their alternative, homosocial existence, their quasi-autonomy from men” and "their promotion of a modern spirituality based on authenticity of the person,” nuns emerged as accessible figures through which to explore changing patterns of gender identity and were, for a brief but intense period, the unlikely pop cultural “heroines of a new version of independent, authentic femininity” (7).  

Form

Defined in these terms, the film version of The Sound of Music might be seen to place attempted limits on the textual agency of the nuns and, with it, the themes of female authority and communal self-definition they represent. Sullivan, for example, gives the film decidedly short shrift in her work, arguing that it “was not a nun film in the purest sense of the term” and noting with regret how “the convent setting quickly melts away” (80). Compared to the original Broadway musical from which it was adapted, the film version of The Sound of Music reduces the diegetic prominence of the nuns and the amount of performative ‘text time’ they are accorded (Wolf, 221ff). It reallocates some of the nuns’ songs –– in the stage production, “My Favourite Things” is sung as a duet between Maria and the Mother Abbess, rather than the children (Flinn, 66) –– and moves several scenes out from the Abbey to the scenic variety of location shooting. However, a counter-argument can as easily be made that the film more than compensates this diminution of content with the value-adding amplitude of cinematic form. 

Consider, for example, the film’s opening post-credit sequence where the nuns congregate for Vespers and we are introduced to life in the Abbey. Serving as a veritable masterclass in the art of film narration, this sequence uses the full palette of cinematographic techniques –– detailed mise-en-scene, painterly framing, carefully measured montage –– to evoke in a few short minutes a whole rich storyworld for the Abbey and its diverse community of women. Filing into the chapel from multiple directions, the nuns form an organic social union flowing with harmonious ease, while a series of meticulously composed close-ups offers a complementary accent on character individuation and interiority. When the film thus segues into the comic situation number, “(How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Maria”, the various ‘named’ Sisters who assume narrative focalisation do so with an established sense of context. Far from flat ciphers, the nuns are given a rich and complex backstory that offsets, or at the very least tempers, the vaudevillian levity of the number.

The enhanced cinematic treatment of the nuns didn’t go unnoticed by critics at the film’s release, when memories of the stage show were still culturally fresh. Even as he lamented some of the losses in the transfer from stage to screen, Bob Freund (1965) praised the way the film returns the “primary nuns…to their proper type.” “On stage, the nuns were just too giddy, too coy,” he writes, “but here the humor is bulwarked by an essential dignity” (8B).  “In its vast extension of dimensions beyond the stage play,” echoed Jean Walrath (1965), “the movie …invest[s the nuns] with charm and even a sense of depth which the stage could only suggest” (4C). 

More recently, in a book-length study of cinematic representations of female religious, Maureen Sabine (2013) contends that the nuns of The Sound of Music help “save the film from unremitting kitsch” because they bring gravitas to the otherwise sentimental proceedings and “as a body of good women, humanize and leaven the sugar spun stereotypes in which they are cast” (175). Praising the “visual beauty and sublimity” of the film’s imaging of the religious life, Sabine writes that the “nuns of Nonnberg Abbey” signal a vein of “graced presence” in the film (190), going so far as to suggest that: “Perhaps one of the many reasons why The Sound of Music remains one of the most popular and loved films of all time is that it gave fans the feeling that they, too, had spent time in God’s presence” (191). 

Performance

Needless to say, an integral element of the film’s deftly crafted representation of the nuns is the cast of talented female actors who bring the characters to performative life. Carefully handpicked by director Robert Wise from a long list of candidates, the actors were ultimately chosen not just for individual charisma and character ‘fit’ but for their capacity to complement each other as part of a well-rounded group (Hirsch, 55ff). 

Taking on the principal role of the Mother Abbess, Peggy Wood  –– who reportedly edged out several big name contenders including Jeanette MacDonald and Irene Dunne –– brought the perfect blend of maternal authority and human warmth, augmented by her strong intertextual associations with other ‘earth mother’ roles, notably the titular matriarch of the long-running TV series, I Remember Mama (1949-1956). Wise, who had not previously worked with Wood, recalls “falling in love with her” at their first meeting in New York. “One of the best bits of casting on the film,” he proclaimed, “Very, very warm” (Santopietro, 99). 

For the twin “sidekick” roles of Sister Margaretta, the kindly Mistress of Novices, and Sister Berthe, the irascible Mistress of Postulants, Wise chose Anna Lee and Portia Nelson, respectively. The elegant Lee came with decades of film experience both in her native England where she was a leading star of early British sound cinema and, following the war, in Hollywood where she built a second career as a respected character actor in a gallery of memorable support parts (Hirsch, 60; Monush, 130-32).* Celebrated cabaret performer, Portia Nelson was possibly a less orthodox casting choice, if only because she had never before appeared on film, but her striking angular features, tart delivery and flair for subtle physical comedy made for an instantly winning screen presence (Hirsch, 59; Monush, 132-33). Moreover, the stark physical and performative contrasts between the diminutive Lee and lanky Nelson were a strategic part of their chemistry as the film’s semi-comic duo.

Of the remaining nuns, Marni Nixon in the part of the warm-hearted Sister Sophia (”Oh, I love her very dearly…”) has garnered the most attention, largely because The Sound of Music marked the first time audiences could see, rather than merely hear, her (”Noted,” IV-11). The most famous of all Hollywood ‘ghost singers,’ Nixon provided the singing voices for a raft of female stars in big Hollywood musicals including Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956), Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961) and, most controversially, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964). In point of fact, it was the brouhaha surrounding the casting of the non-singing Hepburn in My Fair Lady that essentially led to Nixon’s public ‘outing’, ending decades of industry secrecy surrounding the practice of vocal dubbing (Pauley, 23). The part of Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music marked Nixon’s first credited screen appearance and she was hopeful that the exposure might see her “more in demand to do roles myself” (Pauley, 23). Unfortunately, with the bottom fast falling from the screen musical market, The Sound of Music would be the highpoint of Nixon’s film acting career. Other than a few subsequent minor appearances, she never enjoyed the kind of cinematic success she deserved.  

Rounding out the cast of principal ‘singing nuns’ are two uncredited performers: Doreen Tryden as the ambivalent Sister Agatha (”It’s very easy to like Maria … except when it’s, uh, difficult”) and Ada Beth Lee as the short bespectacled Sister Catherine. Doreen Tryden was trained as a classical singer and she performed in opera, concert and radio during the war years, before branching into film and recording work (”Bowl Concert,” 15). She secured a number of minor screen appearances–– a nightclub singer in The Falcon’s Adventure (1946) and a hospital patient in Angel Face (1953) –– and  also contributed vocals to the soundtracks of films such as The Egyptian (1954), Athena (1954), and The Second Greatest Sex (1955). However, like Marni Nixon, Tryden’s main claim to Hollywood fame was as a ‘ghost singer’ dubbing a string of stars including Joy Ann Page in Kismet (1944), Donna Reed in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Angela Lansbury in The Hoodlum Saint (1946), and Andrea King in My Wild Irish Rose (1947) (Kreuger, 49-54). Following The Sound of Music, Tryden’s film career seems to have petered out. She continued a recording career of sorts –– she was a member of the popular Ray Conniff Singers for a few years and also provided backing vocals for several other artists  –– but it isn’t clear what became of her beyond that. If anyone out there knows, inquiring minds await… 

A graduate of piano and voice from Drake University, Ada Beth Lee started her career as a radio singer in Chicago during the war years before moving to Los Angeles and a career in film and TV work (”Valley Singers”, 1). She was happily married for many decades to her college sweetheart, Bill Lee, a celebrated studio vocalist and ‘ghost singer’ in his own right. In point of fact,  Bill Lee was called on to dub the singing voice of none other than Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music (Hollis and Ehrbar, 85-86). Like the other ‘nuns’, Ada Lee’s film career largely dissipated after The Sound of Music but she remained active in Hollywood professional and community musical spheres for many years till her passing in 1991 (”Obituaries”, B7). As an interesting aside, one of Ada and Bill’s children, Diana Lee continued the family tradition of Hollywood ‘ghost singing’ during the profession’s twilight years, dubbing Samantha Eggar in Doctor Dolittle (1967), Diana Sowle in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Liv Ullman in Lost Horizon (1973).

While neither Ada Beth Lee nor Doreen Tryden earned screen credits for their work in The Sound of Music, there was one other screen nun who, in a curious bit of front office business, did. Playing the very minor role of Sister Bernice, the young nun who rushes up to the Mother Abbess at the start of the film to announce that she “simply cannot find” Maria, Evadne Baker secured the rare distinction of both an opening and end screen credit for her performance, despite appearing for less than a minute of screen time. A classically trained ballerina and model from South Africa, Baker had been “discovered” in a Las Vegas show by a Twentieth Century-Fox talent scout and placed  “under contract…one of the few junior players kept on thru [sic] the studio’s period of adjustment” (Hopper, 22). She received the full old-school star treatment from Fox, right down to a syndicated press profile from Hedda Hopper. However, Baker failed to find lasting success in films, and the part of Sister Bernice would be her biggest, and final, screen role. Such are the cruel vagaries of show biz.

Final mention needs to go to another uncredited but very special nun in The Sound of Music. In the film’s second half, after Maria has fled back to the Abbey, she is summoned to the office of the Mother Abbess. Just before she enters there is a brief exchange involving the Abbess and an in-coming postulant who is escorted by an older nun, Sister Augusta. The latter is played by none other than Dorothy Jeakins, the costume designer for The Sound of Music, as well as scores of other classic films. Jeakins reportedly stepped in to the role “when a bit player failed to appear on schedule…with the stipulation that she receive no screen credit” (”Designer Takes Part,” 7-F). Jeakin’s surprise cameo was mentioned briefly in media reports of the time but, for some reason, it has been almost entirely forgotten in subsequent discussions of the film. Mind, it wouldn’t be the last time the famed designer made an on-screen appearance in a Julie Andrews film. The very next year, Jeakins would don one of her own Oscar-nominated costumes in Hawaii (1966) for a brief but memorable cameo  –– this time, with credit –– as Hepzibah Hale, the stoic New England farm mother of Abner Hale (Max von Sydow) (Hennessy, 5). 

So next time you watch The Sound of Music, take a moment to appreciate the enriching presence of the nuns in the film and the many talented actors and production crew who brought them to such vivid cinematic life. Sisters of Nonnberg, we salute thee…

Notes:

* In another bit of ‘small world’ trivia, Anna Lee was previously married to British film director Robert Stevenson who directed Julie in her motion picture debut, Mary Poppins (1964). Lee would work with Julie again a few years later in Star! (1968) where she was cast by Robert Wise in another cameo part as an aristocratic English hostess.

Sources:

“Bowl Concert Highlights Duo Singers and Pianist.” San Bernardino Daily Sun. 1 July 1941: 15.

Crist, Judith. “Sugar and Spice, But Not Everything Nice.” The New York Herald Tribune. 3 March 1965: 22.

Crowther, Bosley. “’The Sound of Music’ Opens at Rivoli.” The New York Times. 3 March 1965: X-1.

“Designer Takes Part of Nun.” The Des Moines Register. 28 March 1965: 7-F.

Dyer, Richard. “The Sound of Music.” Only Entertainment. London and New York: Routledge, 1992: 46-59.

Farmer, Brett. “The Singing Sixties: Rethinking the Julie Andrews Roadshow Musical.” The Sound of Musicals. Steven Cohan, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 114-127.

Flinn, Caryl. The Sound of Music. (BFI Film Classics). London: Palgrave, 2015.

Freund, Bob. “Film Review: Film Improves ‘The Sound of Music’.” Fort Lauderdale News. 17 March 1965: 8B.

Hennessy, Helen. “This Oscar Winner Designs Fashion.” The Evening News. 14 October 1966: 5.

Hirsch, Julia Antopol. The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993.

Hollis, Tim and Ehrbar, Greg. “Bill Lee: Singer of a Thousand Voices.” Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records. Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi  Press, 2007: 85-86.

Hopper, Hedda. “Package Full of Perfection: Evadne Baker.” The Chicago Tribune Magazine. 26 January 1964: 22-24.

“It Has to be a Habit.” The Sunday Star-Bulletin and Advertiser. 19 December 1965: 32.

Kemp, Peter. “How Do You Solve a ‘Problem’ Like Maria von Poppins?” in Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond. Bill Marshall and Robyn Stillwell, eds.  London: Intellect, 2000. 

Kreuger, Miles. “Dubbers to the Stars: Whose Voice Was That I Heard you Singing With?” High Fidelity. Vol. 22. No. 7. July 1972: 49-54.

Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974. London: Bloomsbury, 1998.

Monush, Barry. The Sound of Music FAQ: All That’s Left to Know about Maria, the von Trapps, and our Favorite Things. New York: Applause, 2015.

Mordden, Ethan. Rodgers and Hammerstein. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

“Noted Film Ghost Plays a Live Role.” The Los Angeles Times. 9 March 1965: IV-11.

“Obituaries: Ada Beth Lee.” The Los Angeles Times. 5 January 1992: B7.

O’Reilly, Louise. The Impact of Vatican II on Women Religious: Case Study of the Union of Irish Presentation Sisters. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Pauley, Gay. “Faceless Voice of the Films.” The Times. 15 October 1964: 23.

Sabine, Maureen. Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

Santopietro, Tom. The Sound of Music Story. New York: Random House, 2015.

Sullivan, Rebecca. Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Thomas, Bob. “Good Year for Movie Nuns.” The Courier-News. 28 September 1965: 28.

Tynan, Kenneth. “Films: Singing in the Syrup.” The Observer Weekend Review. 28 March 1965: 25.

“Valley Singers Presented in Building Fund Recital.” The Van Nuys News. 6 June 1946: 1.

Walrath, Jean. “’Sound of Music’ Returns.” Democrat and Chronicle. 16 April 1965: 4C.

Wilde, Melissa. Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Wolf, Stacey. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Copyright © Brett Farmer 2018

Special thanks to Hanne