Many of the formative films of my childhood come with crisp sense memories of the first time I saw them: precisely what cinema or whose couch, the time of day and the weather outside, who I was watching with, my in-the-moment reactions to what delights or shocks the film threw at me.
The Sound of Music, however, is an exception. Robert Wise’s swirling, swollen 1965 film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical has been a personal favourite since long before I ever thought to list personal favourites – a seasonal staple, a constant generator of unprompted earworms, a point of good-natured familial conflict between those who love it and those who merely pretend not to, a film so laden with short-cut iconography that it rushes quickly to mind when I see a certain shade of upholstery, a particular bob haircut or even a passing nun.
