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This Film On

The Diary of Anne Frank

Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatists Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett adapted for the screen their Broadway hit The Diary of Anne Frank, itself based on the book Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. As reverently filmed by George Stevens, The Diary of Anne Frank is highly theatrical in tone and style, but what do you expect from a film about characters claustrophobically trapped in an attic for two years?

The story opens in 1945, then flashes back to 1942, where Anne Frank is one of eight Jews forced into hiding in WWII Amsterdam. German emigres in Holland, the Franks rely on the kindness of one Mr. Kraler (Anne's pseudonym for Victor Kugler) and young Miep Gies, among others. Anne, sister Margot (Diane Baker), mother Edith (Gusti Huber) and father Otto (Joseph Schildkraut)— installed in a hidden annex above a business office—share the space with another family, called the van Daans in Anne's diary and the subsequent adaptations: Petronella (Shelley Winters, in an Oscar-winning turn), Hans (Lou Jacobi) and sixteen-year-old son Peter (Richard Beymer of West Side Story). Later, the two families are joined by Mr. Dussel (Ed Wynn).

With actors Schildkraut, Huber and Jacobi reprising their stage roles, the film version offers a pleasing continuity from the hit play. When the stage Anne, Susan Strasberg, and second choice Audrey Hepburn turned down the role, actress/model Millie Perkins became the screen Anne. Perkins gives a sturdy, old-school performance as the blossoming thirteen-year-old who correctly predicts, "I'm going to be remarkable." A more resonant performance, and subtler writing and direction, would have made the film more artful, but as it is, Stevens pushes the sensibility of 1950s drama about as far as it can go. A dream montage features imagery of the concentration camps, and Stevens shot a finale depicting the same that was discarded after test audiences blanched.

The Diary of Anne Frank works best as a sort of Hitchcockian thriller (Lifeboat in hiding?) defined by torturous uncertainty and high tension. Everyone freezes when a siren pierces the air, and the close quarters foster arguments, jealousies and suspicion ("We don't need the Nazis to destroy us," says Mr. Frank. "We're destroying ourselves"). Matters are further complicated by how even when "interrupted," life goes on by dint of human nature. For example, Otto organizes makeshift schooling, and Hans climbs the walls with nicotine withdrawal. Most importantly, Anne's pubescent stirrings are unstoppable, and the presence of handsome and sensitive Peter cannot be denied for long. Accurately summing up the situation, Anne tells Peter, "We have problems here that no other people our age have ever had." The clinches between Anne and Peter are the film's most florid passages, though they cannot help but contribute to the film's emotional impact. 

Stevens was surely the right man for the job of bringing The Diary of Anne Frank to film. Whatever its faults, the film has a depth of feeling and intention that makes its way from its director, who was forever changed by his experience shooting the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau as a member of the Army Signal Corps. Stevens gets good support from composer Alfred Newman and photographers William C. Mellor (who won the Oscar that year) and Michael Powell's go-to guy Jack Cardiff (who lensed the Amsterdam location footage). The well-received film remains a potent statement about the horrors of war and a valid testament to the girl who could answer them by writing, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart."