New Picture

Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox), first as a book published in 1952, then as a play produced on Broadway in 1955 (and subsequently in 30 other countries throughout the world), has established itself as the single most heart-stirring document to come out of World War II. Now converted into a movie of epic length (two hours and 50 minutes --39 minutes longer than the play) by Producer-Director George Stevens, Diary takes on new and subtly expanded dimensions. Tighter than the book, more fluid than the play, the film is a masterpiece.

Director Stevens' triumph is all the more stunning in view of the fact that the story of Anne Frank is an extremely tiny story, and what there is of it is unsuited to the prime cinematic requirement that a motion picture must have motion. Little Anne was 13 years old when her family, together with another Jewish family and a querulous dentist, were forced to hide out in the attic of an Amsterdam factory to escape the Nazi pogrom. For two years the eight fugitives, supplied with meager amounts of food by friends, crouched in the same wretched refuge until the Nazis found them -- only nine months before the liberation of Holland. Of the eight, only Anne's father, Otto Frank, escaped death in concentration camps, and it was he who released Anne's meticulous diary record of their two desperate years.

This is hardly the stuff that cinematic dreams are made of. But Stevens and Scriptwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who also wrote the Broadway play) are far more concerned with the stuff that life is made of, and the courage and dignity that man can summon from within himself when the only logical course seems to be to lie down and die. From the moment the refugees enter their hideaway, and Papa Frank announces the painful conditions of their survival--no daytime movement, speech or even use of the w.c. --the cramped loft thrums with a threat as foreboding from within as from without. Young Anne wakes from a nightmare with terrified screams; greedy old Van Daan. whose wife and teen-age son share the flat with the Franks, tries to steal a crust of the communal bread; the dentist bolts for the door when the phone in the deserted office below jangles noisily. Yet no one cracks so completely that the cement of their absolute dependence on one another cannot repair the damage.

From outside comes a peril more dire, if not more wearing, than hunger or boredom or claustrophobia. Nazi boots clump on the cobblestone sidewalks, and the heehaw of the paddy wagon siren sounds in the night; from their window the fugitives watch, horrified, as the greengrocer across the street, and the two Jews he has been harboring, are hauled off. In a scene more tension-packed than anything Alfred Hitchcock ever devised, two Germans search the factory by night after a burglar has broken in. As the refugees huddle breathlessly in the loft, the suspicious Germans stretch out their investigation for long, agonizing minutes. As they prowl, Stevens' camera flashes to a shot of the family cat, perched on the drainboard. its nose prodding a small funnel toward the edge, its rear leg scuffing against a plate. The fugitives--and the audience--can do nothing but watch the animal in paralyzed silence.

Stevens has injected a dozen such hairbreadth episodes into the film, each a little scarier than the last. Yet Diary is no more a mere thriller than Moby Dick is a mere whaling yarn. The movie shines with a fundamental conviction that, even under the most abysmal conditions, man will find a way to pass on what he has learned and to perpetuate himself. "Here we are," cries Anne petulantly, "the whole world falling around our ears, and I don't know what to think." She knows far more than she thinks--devotion to her father, understanding of her skittish mother, joy in her religion, pleasure in her active mind, the mystery of romantic love for young Peter van Daan, "the miracle of what is taking place inside me."

Director Stevens screened more than 10,000 applicants in a search for an unknown capable of combining the bittersweet charm, the alternate flashes of gaiety, melancholy and quick-witted insight that made up Anne Frank. His choice was an 18-year-old model from Fair Lawn, N.J. named Millie Perkins. Gambling against the idea of using an established actress ("I wanted someone who could be identified as Anne Frank, not as a well-known actress playing a role"), Stevens wins handsomely. Newcomer Perkins, who suggests a younger, thinner, more animated Elizabeth Taylor, has an untrained voice that sometimes jars the ear, but more important, she also has a quicksilver face that delights the eye. Lined up with Broadway Veterans Joseph Schildkraut and Gusti Huber (as her father and mother) and Hollywood Pros Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn (as Mrs. van Daan and the fussy bachelor dentist), she maintains Anne's position right where it should be--the dead-center focal point of an artistically brilliant argument for human dignity.

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