THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 26

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

(20th Century-Fox-CinemaScope) G Cert. T is not a comfortable thing to discover in oneself imtimations of insensitivity and I feel at the moment a little ashamed to admit that The Diary of Anne Frank moved me less deeply than I thought it should. Other and lesser tragedies of innocence have affected me profoundly enough; a failure of response

to this one, so heroically rooted in reality, was disquieting. . But there were, I think, contributory causes. The essence -of Anne’s story is surely the inextinguishable life in it, the resilience of her spirit, the simple devices by which the family and those with them sought to achieve some pattern of normality in an- existence insanely abnormal, and not least, the long thoughts of youth and the first diffident steps towards maturity. Anne’s story,

hike the sweet herbs which sprang from the rubble of the Blitz, surprises first by the harsh incohgruity of its environment, but the fragrance persists-a quality independent of contrast, though enhanced by it. In the film (produced and directed by George Stevens) the environment is always with us. Here, I felt, was not so much the story of Anne as that of Otto Frank and his wife, of the Van Daans, and the sad little Mr Dussel who was "used to being alone." The voice of the narrator is the voice of Anne, but what we have is an adult’s view, looking inward at the group immured in the oubliette above the spice warehouse in Amsterdam as. the days follow one an-. other in an apparently unending monotony of apprehension. The film is long-it lasts nearly three hours-and the slow passage of time is the most over-powering ingredient in it. Even the seagulls, soaring overhead from the port, seem to flap with tired wings beyond the little attic window where Anne and the boy Peter first turn hesitantly to one another. That moment, delicately and sensitively recorded, islanded by silence from the recollection of things past and the fear of things to come, is the film’s most touching passage and the point at which we come closest to Anne herself. Elsewhere it records with an almost documentary fidelity the silent discipline of the long days (no sound or movement of any kind could be risked while the warehouse workers were in the premises below), the occasional alarms and the agonising suspense of waiting for discovery, the determined cheerfulness which eked out the occasional modest celebration, and the inevitable tensions which developed among the weaker members of the group. But it is the slow march of time and the ingrowing anxiety of the adults that colours the story most sombrely, and communicates ‘inease of a sort not always in tune with the apprehensions which afflict. the . *haracters. The casting is on the whole satisfactory. Joseph Schildkraut, who played the part of Otto Frank on the stage, is unobtrusively effective, and Gusti Huber is competent as his wife. The

comedian Ed Wynn was surprisingly good as Mr Dussel and his account of what has been happening to Jews "outside" is one of the screen story’s authentic moments of horror.

I wish I could grade Millie Perkins’s achievement more precisely. I’d say without hesitation that she has not Susan Strasberg’s acting capacity, but she has undoubted charm and she has been directed with sense and __ sensitivity. With the help of cameraman and director she occasionally achieves illumination, as in the idyllic passage at the attic window, but she does not make the part irrevocably her own.