"you never told me how enchanting your children are"

in utility world...

gretl: where is Father going with Fraulein Maria?
max: ...
liesl: ...
elsa: they are going to pray, dear. if you wait, you'll hear them both talking to God.

i cannot believe you made me go there.

enjoy it? i'm not sure how i got here...

yes. i used to think it was gretl's actions that made him think of maria, but now i think it was elsa's line... it sums up everything maria was just yelling at him about. my interpretation of this has totally changed. it's been quite a day!

nope, that was it for today. for me it was pretty huge, though.

actually, now that i think about it, i watched franz's reaction to maria when she first arrives. observation: join the nazi party, have your personality automatically disappear. true story.

Absolutely. 

I think he knew she was different when she was curtsying in the ballroom and later, blowing that whistle at him. You can see the look in his face. “this one is trouble.”

I have never read through this one before either. I'm laughing so hard right now!!

Actually about 2 days ago I had been returning to this scene for further ultra-micro analysis. I was trying to gage the expression on Elsa's face when Georg leaves the room to go after Maria to see whether she worked out the writing was on the wall for her and Georg here (so one scene before the after the puppet show moment). Results: inconclusive. She seems a bit more perplexed that he leaves rather than "why is my man running off to talk to that young thing who is looking pretty good dripping wet?" I'll have to go and research it some more... Slo-mo coming up!!

elsa probably guessed (if she couldn't hear it) that G fired M. watching him run off to tell her something could be the first inkling that M was someone to keep an eye on. i don't know that elsa understood what just happened. she probably didn't know anything about the strained relationship b/w him and the children or at the least didn't care. that something makes him change his mind about maria must be a little bothersome. really elsa is operating in the dark at this point, i think. i mean, max may have clued her in to things ahead of time, but honestly i don't think elsa and max thought of the children much at all.

I think Elsa knew he wasn't close to the children (if he was, he wouldn't keep running off to Vienna for weeks/months at a time), and I think she really didn't care, because she didn't want them around anyway.

I do think Max knew, and cared. The children obviously love Uncle Max, and I see it as him being probably the only adult in their lives that would treat them, and allow them to behave with him, as children---their father obviously didn't, and probably the staff didn't dare.

Yes, I almost added the 'typical' point to my own post.

I wonder what is going through Elsa’s mind when Georg starts singing with his children. It was just a nice little song that the children were singing for her, then Georg starts in and the children stop singing and look shocked, then the song is over and he looks at them like he is seeing them, truly seeing them, for the first time in years. I’m sure she had no idea what kind of turning point she was witnessing.


My favorite part of this entire movie is after the song is over and Georg opens his arms and Brigitta falls into them as the other children rush to be near him. LOVE IT! LOVE IT! LOVE IT!


Gretl looks to Maria for direction, which I think is sweet. “You never told me how enchanting your children are.” And Georg shakes his head no, I think mostly to himself because he didn’t know himself how enchanting his children are. He just cared that they looked nice and marched in a straight line, which reminds him of the argument he just had, so he turns to find Maria.


What a big day for the captain. He just realized that he is not being a great parent to his children, but has to desire to change. But this realization forces him to see Maria differently too. As he looks at her on the stairs, she is no longer the undisciplined unsophisticated troublemaker he has cast her to be up until this point. She is now his savior (sorry). At least, she has saved his relationship with his children, which no one had dared attempt to do until this point, so I think he now has great respect for her and her opinions. And ultimately, she set the groundwork to save him from a marriage of convenience (I think that even if he hadn’t fallen for Maria, just his desire to spend more time being a good father would have ended things with Elsa eventually).

I really like Georg's change of expression after this line. He shakes his head no in answer to her question, but never seems like he is completely paying attention to her. He is just basking in how enchanting they are to him. Then, bam, it hits him like a ton of bricks and he realizes the depth of what Maria has done for him. 

I think there is also an element of Maria making Georg look 'good' in the eyes of Elsa that softens him, despite the whole boat incident.

I feel that Maria was quite set on helping the children to find a new mother again and worked really hard with them while Georg was away (and applying her own style of discipline) so they would make a good impression when the Baroness returned. Can you imagine all the work she would have done to get them to sing like that, to know what to do that after their father dismissed them to go and get changed and return to the landing...then they had the where-with-all (7 children!) to get dressed, fix their hair, get in formation and start singing in a relatively short period of time. I think Georg realizes the enormity of all this after Elsa makes that comment.

In the argument he just had, he was furious because Maria had let the children run around Salzburg wearing drapes. They swamp the boat together and look like drowned rats - so much for good first impressions. It's all looking like the children have descended into "hooligan-ness" to Georg and he's spitting fire. Then, there's the sudden realization that she had worked miracles and he never thought it possible. After all, the last thing we see him say to Maria is that he hoped before he returned, she would have acquired some discipline (he didn't have high expectations when he left for Vienna!) and his impression to that point is that she had acquired none.