The Diary of Anne Frank

DIARY OF DECREES

During George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank, you keep asking questions the movie won’t answer: How did the occupants handle emergency dumps when they couldn’t flush the water closet from 8 AM to 6 PM? Wouldn’t the wood floors creak even when wearing socks? Didn’t sweet darling Anne ever have an ugly thought or two? Have handy her unexpurgated diary—she was uncanny with prescience in providing minutia. Meant to be, the “star” of the show isn’t the endlessly expressive Anne, or the unrelenting dread of the “we’re coming to get you” sirens signaling transport of the hidden to the final solution. It’s Stevens’ meticulousness; this is moviemaking precise, calculated—there aren’t any feelings not decreed. One consummate example: Moushie the cat’s endangerment to the closeted when eating from a plate on a counter top. The director’s mechanisms and timing are beautifully and elongatedly transparent—viewers indeed have time to skim Anne’s incidentals while observing—and he works some amazing magic: fearing a widescreen process would diminish the claustrophobic trauma drama atmosphere, he and photographer William Mellor manage to find ways and angles to use CinemaScope, including the celebrated pans of the floors, to provide both the heavy feel of entrapment and the sense of air and life going on outside the limited parameters. (Without the process, we might go as crazy as Momma Frank does when she catches Mr. Van Daan stealing bread, the kind of response audiences are known to have in a first rate production of the play.) In the title role Stevens hoped Audrey Hepburn would consent to (and declining because she felt too close to the subject matter), Millie Perkins has the angelic sadness the weighted material wants to extol, though she’s certainly not 13 years old, nor 15 when the Nazis come for the roundup. On the other hand, she’s not the unnerving exposer of emotions Anne’s writing suggests, or what then-surviving father Otto Frank would permit us to discover. Surprisingly, Shelley Winters is perhaps too restrained as Mrs. Van Daan, which for the audience might be a mixed blessing. You keep waiting (hoping?) for one very shrill blowout, beyond her “Shut Up!” to her hubby and her defensive posturing when called out about giving him a larger slice of cake than others. She goes mildly berserk when clumsy Anne accidentally spills milk on her fur, but not so bonkers when the hubbie wants to sell the fur to feed his nicotine habit. Perkins’ Anne says off-camera the Van Daans would argue violently but Stevens isn’t up for a full scale version of the Bickersons. Diane Baker as Anne’s sister gets sick from something unnamed; she’s fed all the meds available to keep her quiet and not entirely successful. Richard Beymer hasn’t a whole lot to say, a good thing. Ed Wynn’s never-married dentist is creepy, a sort of deeply repressed pedophile as hypochondriac who pops pills when dealing with the cat in their attic quarters. Moushie gives the movie’s most memorable performance, intuitively knowing how to sit imperiously while whipping the long tail, knowing how to pace the floor as if mimicking the residents’ anxieties, knowing how to keep the audience in a state of suspended panic when two Nazis are snooping around, and knowing when to get the hell out of that asylum. There’s multiple credit for the dissolves: Stevens and Mellor, film editors David Bretherton, William Mace and, one of William Wyler’s dependables, Robert Swink. Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett adapted their Pulitzer prize-winning play. The location shooting was directed by George Stevens, Jr. and photographed by Jack Cardiff. Actress Nina Foch an uncredited second unit assistant; Haskell Wexler an editorial assistant. Original running time 180 minutes for limited roadshow and special engagement showings; “popular prices” prints at 156 minutes. (Opening 4/24/1959 at the McVickers, running for 7 weeks.)

Oscar wins for best supporting actress (Winters), b & w art direction and cinematography; nominated for best picture, director, supporting actor (Wynn), original musical score (Alfred Newman), b & w costumes.

The American souvenir booklet has yet to be located. What is shown at upper left is an altered soundtrack cover. Using it comes by deduction, since it was a frequent advertising ploy for reserved seat attractions to apply the same front to both programs and albums as a measure of continuity in tone. It can’t be accidental for the program of Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told to also be shrouded in mournful black.

As to who snitched on the attic residents: the movie fingers a thief as Judas, though there are persistent claims it might have been an employee working in the spice factory underneath the attic, reportedly receiving from the Nazis about $1.40 for each Jew taken into custody. In 2022, a book entitled The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan chronicles the recent six-year search suggesting it was a Jewish notary who might have revealed the hiding place. The controversy erupting as consequence forced the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos to withdraw the book, and there are clamorings for the American HarperCollins to do the same, which so far hasn’t happened. Here is the YouTube link to the 60 Minutes piece on the primary researcher.

ROLL OVER IMAGE / THE SET

Courtesy LIFE: THE SET

THE SET II

ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com