George Stevens’s film of the diary is sincere and, in Joseph Schildkraut and Shelley Winters, well acted, but it runs three hours on a screen built for horizons, and eight people in hiding are never once allowed to feel hemmed in.
George Stevens directs a 179-minute film of Anne Frank’s diary, from a screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who adapted their own stage play. The material is eight people in a few rooms for two years, most of it spent trying not to be heard. Stevens shot it in CinemaScope, on a screen built for cattle drives and oil fields, and that one decision is the thing the film never gets past. It is sincere, well acted in places and far too long, and the width of the frame lets out the fear it needs.
Start with what works, because a fair amount does. Joseph Schildkraut plays Otto Frank as a courteous, tired man who holds the group together by never letting them see him frightened, and he does it without a raised voice or a speech about it. Shelley Winters is Petronella Van Daan, who arrives with a fur coat and will not be parted from it, and she is vain, scared, funny and the only person on screen who seems to have a body temperature. Lou Jacobi gives her a husband who eats other people’s bread and hates himself for it. Ed Wynn’s Albert Dussell, the dentist who makes eight, is a fussing, timid man, and Wynn plays him small.
The best passages are the quiet ones. During the working day nobody may move, and Stevens lets whole minutes go by with the group frozen at the table while boots cross a floor below them, a lorry passes, a church bell strikes. William C. Mellor shoots these in a grey, flat light with no music under them, and we found ourselves holding our breath, which was not something we had planned to do for a film made in 1959. When Alfred Newman’s strings come back in afterwards we felt the relief and resented it at the same time, because the film had just shown it did not need him.
That is the trouble with Newman throughout. The score tells us what to feel at every turn, rising when a look would have done, and it makes a film about people who could not make a sound into one that rarely stops making them. The three editors, David Bretherton, William Mace and Robert Swink, let scenes run past their point; a row is played out, then played out again with the positions reversed. At 179 minutes the confinement becomes ours, and not in the way that was intended.
Then there is the frame. Mellor lights the annexe handsomely, and the rooms, with their blacked-out windows, hanging washing and single stove, look right. But the wide screen puts a yard of empty floor either side of every actor, and the camera sits back and watches a set with its fourth wall removed, which is what this is. Eight people who cannot get away from one another ought to be crowding the edges of the picture. Here they have room to pace.
Millie Perkins has the face for Anne and not the quickness. The girl who wrote the diary was sharp, vain, self-mocking and often unkind about the people in the next room; Perkins gives us a sweet, well-brought-up child being brave, and her line readings are careful where they should be fast. Her scenes with Richard Beymer’s Peter in the attic are the love story the tagline promises and the slowest stretch of the film. Gusti Huber and Diane Baker, as Edith and Margot, are mostly asked to look pained in the background, and do.
Stevens made Shane and Giant, films about distance and horizon, and he treats these rooms as if they were another landscape, something to be looked at from a long way off. The film’s closing stretch we will not describe, except to say that the history does the work and Stevens, to his credit, mostly lets it.
Watch it at home, where the width matters less and the rooms close in a little. The U certificate is fair, and older children can sit through it if they will sit through three hours. It is a decent, honest account of the diary that would have been a better one at two.
