The film is based on the Broadway musical The Sound of Music, with songs written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and with the musical book written by the writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse and screenplay written by Ernest Lehman. The musical originated with the book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp. It contains many popular songs, including “Edelweiss”, “My Favorite Things”, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”, “Do-Re-Mi”, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”, and “The Lonely Goatherd”, as well as the title song.

It won a total of five Academy Awards including Best Picture and displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time. The cast album was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. In 2001, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry as it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.