As for cleanness, many films may be worse than the Sound of Music, but stop and think - are youth, physical attractiveness and being in love the essence of marriage? Can you imagine this Julie Andrews staying with the Captain if "the romance went out of their marriage"? Would she not divorce him and grab his children from him to be her toys? Such romance is not actually pornographic but it is virtually so, in other words all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out. One remembers the media sensation when a few years later Julie Andrews appeared topless in another film. That was no sensation, just a natural development for one rolling canine female.As for being a family film, by glorifying that romance which is essentially self-centred, The Sound of Music puts selfishness in the place of selflessness between husband and wife, and by putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children. This is a new model family which in short order will be no family at all, its liberated members flying off in all different directions.
Finally as for edification, in The Sound of Music the Lord God is mere decoration. True, His Austrian mountains are beautiful (beautiful decoration), but His nuns are valued only for their sweetness towards the world and their understanding of its ways, while His ex-nun is wholly oriented towards the world.
Bull's eye. Of course The Sounds of Music is sweet and entertaining and PG-rated, and it is perhaps a bit too doctrinaire to demand depth from a Hollywood musical in the first place. But the elements of modern despiritualized neo-paganism are all there. The bishop is correct.
Maria von Trapp said after she saw the film, that its Maria was not her. She meant not simply what most people who see themselves depicted on screen would say, but that it was a distortion of reality.