"In Hollywood, you make your own geography," remarked Robert Wise, the man who transformed Rodgers and Hammerstein​'s Broadway smash, The Sound of Music, into the juggernaut it became on the big screen.

Take the opening, when Julie Andrews as the problematic novitiate Maria  crests a hill and bursts into "The Hills are alive …"

She realises she's going to be late for supper at Nonnberg Abbey and off she belts, charging almost immediately through the gates and into the Mother Abbess, in whose bad books she is already ensconced. But no wonder she was out of breath – the convent is 20 kilometres from where she was singing.

And when Maria and the von Trapp family make their escape from the Nazis, the film has them walking up the Untersberg outside Salzburg and across the Swiss border. The only problem is Switzerland is more than 200 kilometres away and the route they took would have deposited them in the Third Reich.

But there's a reason why Hollywood is all about show business, and Wise turned The Sound of Music  into the best of business. It might have been panned by the critics in February, 1965 – Pauline Kael​ said it was "probably going to be the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom  in movies for the next few years" – but its first run in cinemas lasted more than five years and nine months and it remains the fifth highest grossing film in history.

Not bad for a film about which Stanley Kauffmann​ asked in The New Republic: "Is there a special heaven for film critics? I feel confident of it, after enduring all of The Sound of Music. At that, heaven is small enough compensation for sitting through this Rodgers and Hammerstein atrocity."

The Sound of Music Story marks the 50th anniversary. Tom Santopietro has diligently mined the archives but has no new contribution from the two stars, Andrews and Christopher Plummer. There is plenty of detail as he marches through the history, but some oddities. Why, for example, is the most up-to-date figure for box-office receipts from 10 years ago?

Santopietro says the casting of Andrews as Maria seems with hindsight "both inevitable and also the only possible choice". But she was no shoo-in,  despite having had three Broadway hits, as 20th Century-Fox remained unconvinced about her star quality. Her first film, Mary Poppins, had yet to be released when Wise saw a preview. After five minutes, he said: "Let's go sign her right now, before anyone else beats us to it."

As Santopietro points out, Wise saw that the Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music screenplay resembled a more realistic Mary Poppins. Andrews was to prove a blessing – a star on screen, and a boon off, delighting all who came in contact with her, especially the children cast as the young von Trapps.

Plummer as Georg von Trapp​ was a different matter. Curmudgeonly and grumpy on set, he thought the musical was beneath him as an actor and referred to the film as "S and M".

Despite numerous weather breaks and delays for the odd farmer booting the filmmakers off his land because they were disturbing the cows and disrupting milk production, the film was eventually completed and harvested five Oscars.

Mind you, the Austrians loathed it. It lasted three days on its first run in Salzburg, and only the extras came to see it. Santopietro claims it was due to unease at the portrayal of the Nazi era, but assistant director Georg  Steinitz​, one of the few people Santopietro did interview, reckons it was due to the "Hollywood-centric version of Austrian history".

Santopietro, who has written books about Barbra Streisand, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra and The Godfather, is an enthusiast, seeing The Sound of Music  as "the first, biggest and most sustained pop cultural monument erected by traditional audiences as a fortress against all they found most disturbing in their too rapidly changing society" in the mid-'60s. And the emerging power of the celebrity apparently grew in importance as faith in the American Dream faded in the face of the social unrest.

He likens the film's appeal to that of The Godfather a few years later, each film embracing the "concept of family as refuge from a difficult world, a place of acceptance providing unquestioned love, support, and sense of belonging". With a bit less blood though.

So Santopietro is in the polar opposite camp to Kael, seeing the film's fundamental conservatism as the reason for its success rather than an obstacle ...

Whatever one's view, it's pretty hard to ignore the impact of those songs and that story. As George Cukor​ said: "In spite of its naivete, you find yourself caught up; there's a tug at the heart." For him and millions like him.