Check out Mark Steyn’s obituary for Ernest Lehman, one of the great Hollywood screenwriters (The Sweet Smell of Success, North by Northwest, etc.). Among his observations:
Lehman had his off-days. There’s one small change he made to The Sound of Music that always irks me: in the stage version, Hans the postboy — the guy who’s 17 going on 18 — is a loyal and enthusiastic Nazi but, at the crucial moment, he misleads the party bigshots and thus permits the Trapp family to escape; in the film version, the Trapps escape because the nuns swipe the spark plugs from the Nazis’ car. The first version is the classic Hammersteinian theme that everyone is capable of redemption, or at least doing what’s right in the moment, and it underlines that, whatever their political differences, in the end Hans has lived up to the love he claimed in his song; the second is just cute nun shtick. It’s a tiny shift that makes it a little easier to despise The Sound of Music — as many of Lehman’s friends did. As Burt Lancaster sneered to him, ‘Jesus, you must really need the money.’ Not after two-and-a-half per cent of the profit he didn’t.
Also check out Steyn’s ‘Dorothy Fields Song of the Day‘.
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