The Sound of Music arrived in 1965 and did something that Hollywood had quietly stopped believing was still possible — it reminded a cynical industry and a rapidly changing world that a story told with complete sincerity, performed with complete commitment, and built around the simple, unshakeable conviction that love and courage and music can carry human beings through the darkest chapters of history could still fill every seat in every cinema in every country on earth and keep them filled for months.

It became the highest-grossing film of its year, then of its decade, then one of the most beloved films in the entire history of cinema — a piece of work so completely and so permanently woven into the cultural fabric of the English-speaking world that the songs are known by people who have never seen it and the characters are familiar to generations born long after the cameras first rolled on those Austrian hillsides. What most of those generations do not know — what the decades of television broadcasts and home video releases and anniversary screenings and singalong events have never included — is that the film that the world fell in love with was not the only version of The Sound of Music that Robert Wise and his cast created in those months of filming. The lost scenes that are finally being revealed after decades in the archives — footage that was cut before the film reached its first audience and that has existed since in the particular limbo of material too significant to destroy and too incomplete to release — offer a window into a version of the story that the finished film’s perfection made invisible, showing performances and moments and character dimensions that the editing room removed and that the most devoted fans of one of cinema’s greatest achievements have been waiting, in some cases their entire lives, to finally see.