Goofs for
The Sound of Music (1965) More at IMDbPro »

• Errors in geography: Salzburg is on Austria's German (not Swiss) border. (In real life the von Trapps simply traveled 100 km to the Italian border for a supposed mountain-climbing vacation, crossed openly, and did not return. The border closed the very next day.)
  
  
• Continuity: The first time Maria goes to see the Reverend Mother, Sister Margaretha tells her she can go in and puts a hand on her arm. She takes her hand away and walks out the door. In the next shot, from inside the Reverend Mother's office, she still has her hand on Maria's arm and then walks away again.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Maria sings "My Favorite Things" to the children during the thunderstorm, the Captain comes in and stops the fun. As she watches the children running into line, she says something like "Wha-" after finishing the song, but her mouth doesn't move.
  
  

• Continuity: In the opening scene, when the helicopter camera zooms in on Maria, it's bright and sunny, but when it switches to a regular camera, the sky is suddenly cloudy.
  
  
• Factual errors: Numerous discrepancies of insignia on the German uniforms.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The claim that an orange crate says "Product of Israel" despite Israel not existing at the time the film is set is false. Though the crate and its label are clearly visible in a publicity still taken during the filming of that sequence, the crate is not visible in the completed film.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Papa von Trapp was an officer in the Austrian Navy. Yet how can this be? Austria is a landlocked country. But it wasn't, during World War I, when the old Austria-Hungarian empire, which included what became Yugoslavia, had ports on the Adriatic Sea and Papa Von Trapp served in its navy.
  
  
• Continuity: Capt. von Trapp's hair When the children welcome Maria and the Captain home is a brownish color and in a different style from the rest of the film.
  
  
• Continuity: Bandage (covered with makeup) visible on Liesl's ankle in "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" but not in the surrounding scenes (she sprained her ankle while rehearsing part of the sequence, after other parts had already been shot). The bandage has been erased from the scene for DVD.
  
  
• Continuity: Prior to singing "Edelweiss" in the drawing room, when Maria first offers the Captain the guitar, he is holding a glass of port in his right hand, he begins to raise his left hand to gesture. The scene cuts to a wider shot and the glass is in his left hand as he raises his right to gesture.
  
  
• Continuity: At the party, Herr Zeller meets Captain Von Trapp and the Baroness and then moves on his way. After him are a lady and gentleman who greet the hosts. However, as Herr Zeller is walking away we see the lady and gentleman greet them again over his shoulder.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the thunder storm, when Liesl supposedly climbs up to Maria's room, we see her outside, running over to the window. She then tells Maria she climbed up. She could have climbed up elsewhere and made her way along a ledge, but when we look outside there's no evidence of a ledge wide enough to facilitate her running.
  
  
• Errors in geography: When Maria eats her first meal with the von Trapps, they all use their eating utensils the American way, i.e. with the fork in their right hand.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Maria arrives at the von Trapp house, she has two shadows at 90 degrees to each other. There should only be one shadow, as it is broad daylight.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When Maria is singing "My Favorite Things" to the children the first time, during the first verse and chorus, one of the girls, Marta, is seen miming the words to herself - especially the last line of the chorus, "... so bad!"
  
  
• Continuity: When Maria goes to see the Mother Abbess (after "Maria") the chair is at the end of the desk as she enters the room. But when the Mother Abbess tells her to sit, it is in the middle.
  
  
• Continuity: During "Do, Re, Mi", Maria's hair is blowing in the wind in the long shots but is perfectly combed in the close-ups.
  
  
• Factual errors: The Captain and Maria return to Salzburg early from their honeymoon when they hear about the annexation of Austria to Germany. They pull up to their home, and the Captain quickly tears up a Nazi flag that has been displayed there. It is clearly warm and there are leaves on the trees - late spring or summer. The annexation of Austria took place on 13 March 1938, and it would therefore have been colder, grayer, and there would not have been any leaves on the trees.
  
  
• Continuity: Just before the Captain first sings "Edleweiss", he reaches for a glass, but in the next shot there is a bottle in his hand.
  
  
• Continuity: When the Nazi troops are marching through the town square, the building shadows change position in relationship to the horse and carriage.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Captain von Trapp and Maria come back from their honeymoon, he pulls a Nazi flag down from above his front door. As he does so, he is obviously searching for the correct place to tear the flag and eventually finds a slit which has been marked by the prop people. You can also see the slit going down into the flag.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: In the final scene of the film, the rippling of the grass shows that there is a helicopter hovering above.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The Mother Abbess tells Maria that Captain von Trapp's wife died "several years ago". A distressing number of people have heard this as "seven years ago" and wonder how she can have given birth to the five-year-old Gretl.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Maria and the children come back from their day of play and are singing inside, they decide who is next to sing; Captain Von Trapp. When Maria hands the Captain her guitar, it has no strings on it. While he is playing and singing, the strings will appear then disappear.
  
  
• Errors in geography: At the beginning of the film where Maria is dancing on the top of the mountain and she hears the bells of the convent ringing, firstly the mountain is so far away that there is no chance that she would hear it, even with bionic hearing. Secondly, she runs down the mountain to the cathedral in minutes when it's about 20 miles away.
  
  
• Continuity: In the song "Do Re Mi" when Maria and the children are riding in the carriage, you see the same store fronts several times as the carriage passes by.
  
  
• Continuity: At the beginning of the movie (just after it tells us we're in Salzburg, Austria), the nuns are shown walking through the Abbey on their way to mass. Two nuns are shown beginning to rise from kneeling in front of what may be icons. In the next shot they are no longer there.
  
  
• Continuity: When the children are singing "So Long, Farewell" during the party, the rug moves about 18 inches so the children's feet are lined up
  
  
• Continuity: During the thunderstorm, when Gretel runs into Maria's room, she throws open the door and we hear and see it bang on the opposite wall. However in the next shot, a close up of Gretel we see it bang against the wall again in the background but no sound is heard.
  
  
• Anachronisms: The guitar played throughout the movie is a Goya guitar. Goya guitars were first made by the Levin Company from Sweden in the early 1950s.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the Germans are searching for the family on the roof of the abbey, one of the actors shines his flashlight accidentally toward the "mountains," and it throws a beam of light on the painted wall, revealing the fact that the Alpine scenery is painted, not real.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the Germans are searching for the family when they are hiding between the wall and the tombstones, one shines his flashlight through the locked gates. When the shot goes to the light panning around the enclosures, the beam is not that of a flashlight, but of a spotlight (non-defined edges, lighter/darker parts of the beam, vs. defined edges, bright circle).
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: The exterior front door of the Von Trapp villa, shot in Salzburg, is a double door, maybe 7ft high, with a semi-circular glass fan-light above it. The interior of that same door, shot at Fox's studios in California, has a similar double door below, but with double height solid wood paneling continuing above it. No fan-light to be seen anywhere. It's interesting to note that the back door of the villa, opening onto the rear terrace, and again seen at various points during the movie, is also a 7ft high double door with a fan-light above it, but the interior and exterior versions of this do match up.
  
  
• Anachronisms: When Rolf gives the telegram from Berlin to Liesl, his black feldmutze still has the Austrian red-white-red roundel on it.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: When Maria and the Captain are outside the gazebo, there's a stage light visible in a few shots.
  
  
• Continuity: The front exterior of the house has two rows of windows, yet when you enter the house, there are no windows at the front of the house.
  
  
• Continuity: When Maria capsized the rowboat full of children prior to meeting the Baroness, the rowboat turns sideways and nearly fills with water, sending two-thirds of the sinking boat under the waterline. Seconds later, the boat only contains about ten gallons of water and is floating safely again.
  
  
• Continuity: Every time that the children are all together forming a straight line they manage to keep a straight line of heights, from the eldest to the youngest. But throughout the rest of the film, the five eldest children appear to have different heights from one scene to another.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Maria and the Captain meet the children after their honeymoon, when the children are telling Maria they are going to sing, Friedrich approaches her and he obviously tells her something but there is no sound of it.
  
  
• Continuity: During Maria's 'I Have Confidence' song there is a field with a horse behind her to the right and as she continues singing she goes down a path that puts that would put that field on her right. In the next shot of her singing there is a long building on her right with no sign of the horse or field.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: Before Maria teaches the children how to sing "Do Re Mi," she tunes the guitar. She turns the peg which tunes the high "E" string, but a lower pitch being tuned is heard against the high "E."
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the family is hiding in the abbey, Friedrich has a small smile on his face.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Maria first leaves the convent, one of the bars in the iron gate is visibly cut away to make room for the camera.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): Near the end of "Do-Re-Mi," when Maria and the children are dancing on the stairs, Liesl (Charmain Carr) clearly forgets the choreography and ends up on the wrong step. She attempts to correct it by moving to another step, then back again - she catches up at the very end when the children run up and down the stairs as they finish the song.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Liesl tells Maria that she and her siblings do not know how to sing when it shows her and Rolfe singing "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" in a previous scene. However, Liesl is indicated as being a rebellious teen that doesn't want the rest of her family to know (her romance with Rolfe, for instance, isn't known to the rest of them), so there is every chance that she knew how to sing. Besides, being the oldest, she most likely remembers her mother singing.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When, on their first day out, Maria asks the children what songs they know. Friederich responds that they 'don't know any' songs. Leter when the guitar is offered to Captain Von Trapp and he is deciding what to sing, Friederich can be heard saying 'sing us something we know'. Given, however, that they haven't had much music for at least 5 years, it's likely some wouldn't remember how to sing, but would still know some songs as they listened to it. The fact that Friederich asked for "something we know" is, in fact, proof of that.
  
  
• Continuity: The outside of the Von Trapp house is clearly not the same house as the inside. The front of the house from the outside has tons of windows on all levels but when Maria walks in the front door there are no windows in the two story foyer - just the giant staircase and a plain windowless wall around the front door from the inside.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the opening credits, watch very closely at the bell tower. Sometimes you see a full complete swing on the bell and sometimes the bell appears to have hit a brick wall and suddenly reverts back the other direction only completing a half swing.
  
  
• Continuity: When the children begin to sing "My Favorite Things" to cheer themselves up, they hear Maria's voice joining in the singing. As the children hug Maria, she pulls Friedrich's hat over his eyes and he grabs her suitcase, then seconds later his hat is back on top of his head without him adjusting it.
  
  
• Continuity: Do Re Mi. The children learn the song while wearing their play clothes. They are later seen in other clothes then back to their play clothes.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Immediately after 'Do-Re'Me' as the children finish their stair run, you will see Curt trip slightly on the stair. As the camera fades away, the actor can clearly be seen looking at a crew member (possibly the director) and grinning sheepishly as if recognizing his mistake.
  
  

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