Youth and Beauty versus Wealth – no contest!

Last night because of the dearth of anything to watch on TV and because my Ukrainian wife cannot understand why our TV’s are full of DIY programmes, documentaries, quizzes, cooking programmes and reality shows rather than the sorts of light entertainment programmes that went out of fashion with programme makers in the mid 1980’s and are still very popular in Ukraine we watched The Sound of Music.

It’s a very good musical in its way and I know that it has received cult status but doesn’t the main plot, boy meets girl, girl meets boy, they fall in love but boy already has lover etc jar a little on closer examination?

I mean lets examine this a little bit. The film starts with a young girl in a convent, she’s a bit ‘off her head’ indeed she is a ‘flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown! The Nuns go on to tell us that Maria is in fact : gentle! She is wild! She's a riddle! She's a child! She's a headache! She's an angel! She's a girl!

So Maria is, in the analysis of the older nuns and mother superior, an angel, a girl and a child, and I think the subtext here is that she’s also a VIRGIN (gasp – well it is the end of the 1930’s as well).

So because she hasn’t got into the habit of being a nun they send her off to be a governess in a Captains house – well we all know what sailors are (free and easy, bright and breezy etc etc). But this Navy Captain ain’t so free and easy, bright and breezy, until this bright and young bit of skirt enters his life.

Now the said Captain, like all good sailors has a girl in every port and in Vienna he is wooing a Baroness with a pot load of money (even though he seems to have potloads too) but she’s old!

Pretty soon she’s getting the cold shoulder while this old roué (who has 7 children already, one of whom is sixteen, so he would probably be pushing 40 at least (to be kind!) especially being a brave and famous Captain of a ship) is gazing cow eyed at the pretty virgin skipping about his front garden (and the double bonus is she used to be a nun! How erotic is that – or is that just me?)

So the fairly good looking and trim and stinking rich baroness is given the cold shoulder while Captain Sinbad here quickly grabs himself the Virgin, goes on a months honeymoon, possibly to give her the sacraments of her life, and then escapes from the Nazis and lives happily ever after.

Now who says art doesn’t imitate life, or is it the other way around?