Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer gave the world The Sound of Music in 1965 and in doing so gave it something that no amount of critical analysis or box office accounting has ever fully explained — a film that has been watched by more people across more generations in more countries than almost any other in the history of cinema, that produces in the people who love it the specific and irreducible feeling of something that belongs to them personally rather than to the culture generally, and that carries at its center a partnership between two performers so completely matched in intelligence and in craft and in the specific quality of their presence that the sixty years since have only deepened rather than diminished what watching them together does to an audience.

Christopher Plummer spent a significant portion of those sixty years describing his feelings about The Sound of Music with the kind of affectionately acerbic wit that was his signature — the famous S&M nickname for the film, the mock-complaints about the sweetness, the careful maintenance of an ironic distance from the sentimentality that the world associated with it — while Julie Andrews spent those same years understanding completely that everything he said in public about the film was the performance and that what he actually felt about it, and about her, lived in a completely different and completely unironic register.