BrodyFosse123 said: "BTW- Sound of Music, released just a few years later, was rated "G" - despite some scary (to young kids) moments at the end of the film, so who knows what WSS would have been rated. We shouldn't use today's standards to figure out how a 1961 movie would have been rate if ratings existed at that time.
The MPAA rating system (G, PG, R, etc) wasn’t implemented until 1968 so THE SOUND OF MUSIC was released without any rating - same as ALL films pre-1968, including Hitchcock’s 1960 film PSYCHO. 1966’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? was the first film to use a disclaimer (For Mature Audiences) but the rating system we know today didn’t start till 1968. That G rating implemented onto THE SOUND OF MUSIC was for it’s re-release in the early 1970s. 1984’s GREMLINS was the first to use the PG-13 rating."
I stand "partially" corrected. DVD's and other video releases list it as rated G. To the extent Wikipedia can be trusted (and what it says here seems plausible), the movie was still in distribution in 1968, so it got a rating.. just a few years later than I thought.