Diary of Anne Frank-50th Anniversary Ed (1959)

"A poignant, moving film of hope and tragedy.  Alex Sandell, Juicy Cerebellum
"...[a] magnificent adaptation of the acclaimed play...  Find-A-Video
"A motion picture masterpiece...enriching...exciting and unforgettable.  Los Angeles Examiner
"Superb...vivid...genuine.  The New York Times
"A vivid and carefully produced work of poignancy and loss.  TV Guide

Editor's Note George Stevens' life-altering experience of witnessing the death camps after WWII was doubtless responsible for his desire to adapt the famed diary of the teenaged Jewish girl, played by Millie Perkins. With the feared 'Green Police' or Dutch Gestapo combing Amsterdam in search of Jews, Anne, her parents, Otto (Joseph Schildkraut) and Edith (Anna Huber) another Jewish family, the Van Daans, and a dentist Albert Dussell (Ed Wynn) take refuge for two years in a small attic provided by Gentile shop owners Kraler (Douglas Spencer) and Miep (Dody Heath). Despite their precarious situation, and the sense of claustrophobia created by having to live together in such crowded conditions, covering the windows during the day, and keeping as quiet as possible at all times, the families carry on as best they can. For Anne, her platonic romance with Peter Van Daan (Richard Beymer), the attractive son of often voluble parents, makes the experience more bearable than it is for the adults, whose sense of foreboding is palpable. By surrounding the inexperienced Perkins with a talented cast of veteran performers, which also includes Shelley Winters and Lou Jacobi, Stevens achieves a moving portrait of Frank's innocent precocity, with her ultimate fate the tragic subtext of this intensely compelling film.

	Shelley Winters
	Lou Jacobi
	Joseph Schildkraut
	Millie Perkins
	Ed Wynn
	Diane Baker
	Richard Beymer
	Gusti Huber
	Dody Heath
	Douglas Spencer
	Edward B. Powell - Music Director
	William Mellor - Director of Photography
	Albert Hackett - Screenwriter
	Charles LeMaire - Costume Designer
	Jack Cardiff - Director of Photography
	George Stevens - Producer
	David Bretherton - Editor
	Robert W. Swink - Editor
	Alfred Newman - Composer
	Frances Goodrich - Screenwriter
	William Mace - Editor
	George Stevens - Director

Sight and Sound
"[An] intimate three-hour epic." 02/06/2004 p.6E

EmanuelLevy.Com 8 of 10
"The Diary of Anne Frank" represents director George Stevens at its most earnest and stilted, a combined result of the horrors he had experienced in his military service and perhaps too much respect for the source material, first published as a memoir, then running on Broadway as a play, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett...Stevens' epic-length saga offers an intimate account of human survival and heroism, centering on the harrowing ordeal and brave behavior of eight Jews hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam...While the exteriors were shot in Amsterdam, the rest of the film was made on studio sets. William Mellor's fluid camera work communicated the muted horror of the lengthy confinement in a restricted space...The film's major flaw is the casting of the inexperienced Millie Perkins in the role of Anne Frank as she is the narrative center and we experience the ordeal through her eyes. Perkins looks right but doesn't sound or act right. The part called for an actress who could make the audience understand and feel the power of her emotional truth, her growing pains, and feelings as a young woman...Critics at the time pointed out that Millie Perkins lacked the natural glow and exquisite expressiveness that Susan Strasberg (Acting guru Lee's daughter) had in the stage production. (Ironically, as a screen actress, Strasberg herself lacked those qualities)...The Van Daan couple establish the reality and humanness of the older people in the attic. Shelley Winters gives a flashy, Oscar-winning performance as the crude yet sad as Mrs. Van Daan, mother of Peter (Richard Beymer, also in a pale performance)...As noted, Stevens' direction is meticulous but uninspired. For a while, the illusion of action and suspense--despite the constriction of spacecapture our attentionbut then the whole experience become bloated, overextending its welcome by at least half an hour. - Emanuel Levy

DVD Times 5 of 10
There's something particularly depressing about seeing a good director start to believe their own publicity and contracting the disease of elephantisis. The classic example is David Lean, who in the course of twenty years went from the brilliance of Great Expectations to the endless risible mess of Doctor Zhivago. But you can see the same thing happening to Carol Reed, William Wyler and George Stevens. The latter made The Diary Of Anne Frank in 1959 and had already begun to equate self-conscious 'seriousness' and excessive length with artistic significance. Having turned Theodore Dreiser's brilliant An American Tragedy into the glossily romantic A Place In The Sun and extended a decent ninety minute melodrama into the three hour plus Giant, he embarked upon a quest to turn the deeply moving journal of Anne Frank into an epic meditation on the suffering of the Jews in occupied Europe during the war. It convinced many critics at the time and was nominated for several Academy Awards but in hindsight, it looks trite, turgid and more than a little overlong...The material is so intrinsically moving and powerful that it's hard to understand just how George Stevens could have made such a mess of it. The play itself didn't help. Read now, it seems needlessly hysterical and melodramatic, full of 'significant moments' that have been plucked from the diaries simply in order to make sure that the audience don't feel too depressed at the end. But it is a depressing story and it should be. It doesn't sufficiently dramatise Anne's own inner conflicts between conformity and rebellion -- a theme which constantly recurs in the diaries. The crumbs of uplift are particularly annoying in retrospect...My own feeling is that the Holocaust should not be dramatised at all but if it has to be, then this self-consciously serious and finally very tedious film is not the way to go about it. - Mike Sutton