I was recently reading a story on the reunion of the "Sound of Music" cast on Oprah. Two things in the article were just gratingly wrong or at least ill informed. It is as though the writer (Ed Pilkington) was trying to connect with the reader by making connections with the contents of the movie, but without being particularly familiar with anything other than the basic plot. If you are going to try to connect to your audience, at least get the facts right...
The moment was heralded with a single blast of a railway whistle with which Christopher Plummer used to call the children, just as he did in the film 45 years ago.
Well, the problem with this is that it was a boatswain's whistle (bosun's whistle). Captian von Trapp was a Naval Captian and the bosin's whistle was what he was familiar with and in fact was what we saw on camera in the movie. The use of special calls would have been something with which Captian von Trapp would have been familiar as this whistle was used for similar purposes in the Navy of his day. Maria took issue with the Captian's treating his children as members of his private Navy: the dressing them in uniforms, the marching, and the use of the whistle calls.
...the Austrian single-parent who employs an outspoken former nun called Maria as governess to his seven children.
Maria was never a nun. She was merely a novice. She was sent to the family as the Mother Superior didn't think Maria was a good fit for the cloistered life. She wanted Maria to see the outside world a bit before making a permanent commitment. Also, marriage to a former nun would have created social difficulties and would have been unlikely in that case.