ANASTASIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 919, 22 March 1957, Page 18

ANASTASIA

(20th Century-Fox-CinemaScope) G Cert. \V HATEVER it was that lengthened é (and the queues for Anastasia-sentiment, recollected emotion, nostalgia, the expectation of a good show, or plain curiosity (for a good queue ‘is a potent attraction in itself)-there can have been few who went away without some new understanding of the range and depth of Ingrid Bergman’s acting, and of what we have missed in the years that the tabloids have eaten. But then, this Anastasia is a players’ piece. The direction of Anatole Litvak is frequently hesitant and unsure, His opening set is haphazard in design, his first sequence rather exasperatingly slow to get under way, his location shots (in Copenhagen) are the best contemporary travelogue, and don’t sort well with the period of the story, and the final fadeout leaves one with a slight feeling of deflation. In between, however, there is some quite magnificent staging, in Hollywood’s grand manner, some strong close-up photography (which might have been stronger in black and white than in De Luxe Color), and-above all-excellent acting. : For when I said this was a_ players’ piece, the plural possessive was intentional. Bergman is the heart of the mat- ter, the centre of things-as Garbo would have been. But there are others. Yul Brynner proves to be as convincingly Slav as he was Siamese, and with much more than muscle to make him threedimensional. As the unscrupulous White Russian general who takes an unknown emigrée from the streets, drills and bullies her until she can pass for a princess, presents her to the world as the sole survivor of the massacred Romanovs, then falls under the spell of his own creation (the Pygmalion leitmotiv comes through strongly), Brynner achieves an impressive measure of character development. Helen Hayes as the Dowager Empress has a substantial part and plays it-as one might expect-as if she were indeed an aged Romanov living in the company of ghosts. And Felix Aylmer is notable among the minor players. But inevitably one comes back to Bergman, ‘and to the grace and conviction with which she moves through a whole spectrum of mood and emotion. For Anastasia is no clear-cut character. She is a woman divided within herself,

unaware of her past, uncertain of her future, unable in the end to decide whether she is a Romanov ‘or a lie. To clothe such a part in conviction, to give blood and bone and life to this kind of latter-day fairy tale -as Bergman does- demands acting of the highest order,