60 years on, the hills remain alive with The Sound Of Music.

Some films age gracefully, some date terribly and others, well they practically defy time itself. The Sound of Music falls into the latter category, an institution unto itself, as woven into the cultural fabric as the Happy Birthday song and at least as frequently performed in households with a sufficiently chaotic number of children. Its arrival in 1965 was a game-changer, rescuing 20th Century Fox from financial ruin and cementing Julie Andrews as Hollywood royalty, but its enduring appeal has nothing to do with studio economics. It’s a film that, against all odds, continues to work – and for reasons that go far beyond twirling on mountaintops.

Of course, the Sound of Music mythos is well-trodden ground. Yes, Christopher Plummer famously disliked the syrupy tone (his “Sound of Mucus” quip has been widely reported), and yes, Austria itself was surprisingly indifferent to the film, at least initially until the tourist dollars started rolling in. But the film’s real story lies in the tensions beneath its polished surface – the push-and-pull between reality and fantasy, history and Hollywood, and the lingering notion that, for all its overt wholesomeness, The Sound of Music is practically rebellious in its success.

For a film so aggressively wholesome, The Sound of Music is surprisingly subversive. Its protagonist, Maria, is a force of disruption from the moment she ditches the abbey for a house full of rigid discipline. She is, in essence, a walking act of civil disobedience, bringing joy to a household ruled by whistles and military precision. She upends the status quo, and the film itself follows suit. It’s easy to forget, amid the rolling meadows and singalong classics, that this is a story of defiance – against conformity, against an arranged marriage, and against outright fascism.

Maria and the von Trapp children aren’t just singing their way through an elaborate Austrian holiday; they’re mounting a harmonious but unmistakable resistance, culminating in a literal flight from Nazi occupation. The tension in the film’s final act is built on the terrifying reality that this isn’t just a fairytale. The von Trapps really had to flee (though not by a conveniently scenic mountain pass, but rather via train to Italy). The film packages this danger within its musical brown paper packaging, and ties it up with the string of comfort cinema but The Sound of Music’s heart beats with something more urgent than nostalgia.

If The Sound of Music were merely saccharine, it would have been left behind with other ‘60s musicals that time has politely shuffled offstage. Instead, it endures, in part because of the cracks in its deceptively picture-perfect veneer.

Take Christopher Plummer, whose barely veiled contempt for the material paradoxically improves the film. His Captain von Trapp begins as so rigid he could be mistaken for an ornamental statue in his own home, yet Plummer’s very reluctance makes his thawing romance with Maria feel all the more authentic. In an alternate timeline where he was fully onboard with the schmaltz, his performance might have been too soft, undermining the cold sharpness that makes his transformation so very satisfying.

Then there’s the film’s deceptively clever use of its musical numbers. This is, after all, Rodgers and Hammerstein operating at the peak of their powers, with songs that feel like they’ve existed forever – but listen closely, and the film is constantly tweaking expectations. The duet Something Good replaced a traditional Broadway-style love ballad because Robert Wise thought audiences wouldn’t accept an operatic declaration of love mid-film and Edelweiss (Julie Andrews’ personal favourite) is such a perfect bittersweet anthem that people often mistake it for a genuine Austrian folk song. Even Do-Re-Mi, the ultimate nursery-rhyme earworm, serves as a kind of meta-tutorial on how musicals themselves work, walking the audience through its own logic.

But it’s the surprisingly edgy moments that can go unnoticed by casual viewers. von Trapp’s implacable opposition to the rising Nazi menace and his disdain for those who embrace it – or worse – downplay it may have felt righteous in the decades following the end of World War II but in today’s febrile political climate feels downright courageous. The nuns disabling the Nazis’ car? Ecclesiastical sabotage on a scale we could only wish the real-life Catholic Church would have displayed during the actual conflict. Even The Baroness – often dismissed as a cold obstacle to Maria’s happiness – is actually one of the film’s most intriguingly nuanced characters. She recognises the inevitability of her romantic defeat and exits with a degree of poise and pragmatism rarely afforded to “other woman” figures in classic Hollywood romances, let alone musicals.

Many classic Hollywood musicals haven’t survived the shift in cultural attitudes, but The Sound of Music has outlasted the backlash against earnestness. It shouldn’t work in the modern age – it’s long, it’s unashamedly sentimental, and it’s as much a staple of family-friendly holiday broadcasts as The Wizard of Oz – and yet it does. Perhaps it’s because it’s a rare instance where sincerity doesn’t feel like a compromise. It’s confident in its own grandiosity, anchored by a lead performance from Julie Andrews that radiates charm without ever slipping into saccharine overload.

At 60, The Sound of Music remains a gateway drug to classic cinema for new generations. Its melodies are inescapable, its performances continue to resonate, and its deceptively sharp storytelling keeps it from aging into irrelevance. Whatever Christopher Plummer may have thought of the experience, it turns out we never needed to solve a problem like Maria and if anything we should be striving to raise more problems like her.