They don’t make them like this anymore.
There is a plaque in my apartment that I handmade, fashioned from IKEA shelves, painted white and on it are the notes of Edelweiss, from Rodgers and Hammerstein, the best score ever, in my opinion.
The Sound of Music was of my generation even though it was decades before I was born, it was of my mother’s time and it stayed strong till my time and it will go beyond me to those coming after me. It is my favourite movie. I watch it with my mother any time I am with her and she regrets having me in those moments because I sing every song in my terrible voice and being her favourite movie- the movie came out when she was pregnant with my eldest brother and she watched it about three times in one day in the theatres- she simply wants to watch it in peace. I don’t let her.
The move takes me back to my childhood, I would watch Sound of Music every chance I got, my father had a video club back then when video clubs were a thing, and so we’d watch it regularly and as a child it wasn’t simply about the love story, actually it wasn’t about the love story at all, it was something more, the family, the home, the children… I didn’t quite understand why the captain was not enamoured with the glamourous Baroness, played by the ever excellent Eleanor Parker (they are both in heaven now so what’s stopping them from getting back together if only to spite Maria! She is totally having the last laugh) for now. We are all going to die anyways… I digress. Back to the trio, Eleanor Parker, as Baroness in all her elegance and worldliness was a perfectly fine partner for the captain but there would always be something about Maria and so it was bound to happen from the moment he set eyes on her. That’s romance for you though isn’t it?
The Sound of Music is the greatest romance of all time, it is the story that has spurned so many of its type, the one upon which some element of every love story is based, which would make Christopher Plummer among the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time. I say all this to say, in my opinion. I love that man.
There is a moment in the movie, a precise moment when the love story unfolds in its entirety between the Captain and Maria. During the party in honour of the Baroness, poor dear, when Maria is teaching Kurt how to do the Ländler and Captain von Trapp interrupts them. It is in the fourth or fifth shot when she approaches him from behind, her hand reaching for his shoulder and it goes into a soft sweet tune, they Ländler and cannot take their eyes of each other. That is the moment that defines the love story between these two. The moment in every love story to end all moments.
The loss of Christopher Plummer, his age regardless, is one felt very widely and deeply, for all time. This feels like the end of a truly golden era with the loss of our legends.
I will miss him incredibly.