Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  The Hacketts should have known better. The couple’s problems, which began almost instantly upon signing the new contract, this time included an emotionally draining ten-day visit from Otto and Fritzi, and a feud with Joseph Schildkraut, who felt that his stage role was being diminished in the film.

  George Stevens, whose work included I Remember Mama and Gunga Din, was an obvious choice to direct. He’d won an Oscar for his last picture, A Place in the Sun, based on a Theodore Dreiser novel. He was a serious director who could nonetheless fill seats.

  As a lieutenant colonel in the Army Signal Corps, Stevens had headed the combat motion-picture unit, whose members included seasoned Hollywood cameramen, among them William Mellor, who would photograph The Diary of Anne Frank. The so-called “Stevens irregulars” not only filmed the Normandy invasion (which provides a dramatic moment in the movie of the diary) but also the liberation of Dachau. His footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials and, today, plays continually on a video monitor that visitors see upon entering the exhibition space of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The best-known image from the film is of two boys in their early teens, newly freed prisoners walking down the cobblestone path of the camp. One of them has his arm slung over the other’s shoulders, a Jewish Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in striped uniforms.

  Stevens’s most recent films, Giant and Shane, had proved he could work with young actors. Giant had featured James Dean, whose restless brand of angst would serve as a template for the roiling adolescent emotions in the secret annex. But Giant had only done moderately well; ideally, The Diary of Anne Frank would be Stevens’s ticket back into the mainstream.

  Another hope was that the Broadway cast would repeat their roles, but it soon became clear that Susan Strasberg would not play Anne on screen. The rumor was that she was involved in a distracting affair with Richard Burton; also, she had developed a reputation for being difficult to work with.

  Stevens thought next of Audrey Hepburn. Not only had she been born in the same year as Anne Frank, but she was half Dutch and had spent the war in Holland, stranded throughout the occupation with her mother, a Dutch baroness. But that was part of the reason why Hepburn turned down the role. Anne’s story, she said, would revive too many painful memories. And her age was a problem. She, at least, understood that, at twenty-eight, she would find it hard to play a thirteen-year-old. Besides, she had already agreed to play Rima, the Amazonian bird girl, in the film of Green Mansions.

  Otto Frank traveled to visit Hepburn and to convince her to change her mind. Otto and Fritzi, Hepburn, and her husband Mel Ferrer spent a day at the tranquil Swiss villa where the actress went to escape the pressures of being a star whose first major appearance, in Roman Holiday, had won an Oscar. The Franks stayed through lunch and dinner. But despite the persuasive case that Otto must have made, Hepburn declined. She and Otto stayed friends, and Hepburn, who put her fame behind causes, including campaigns against world hunger and for children’s rights, would become an active supporter of the Anne Frank Foundation.

  When Stevens’s second choice for Anne—Natalie Wood—also passed, a casting call went out for an unknown to play the starring role. The most recent, heavily publicized nationwide search had found eighteen thousand young candidates seeking the title role in Otto Preminger’s 1957 Joan of Arc. Now the hunt for a newcomer who could play Anne would be appropriately international.

  In a newsreel-style promo piece about the making of the film, George Stevens explains that six months had already been spent casting the part of Anne.

  “How many little girls have you talked to?” asks the reporter.

  Six thousand, of which they’d met half, after which they’d reduced the list to “a hundred interesting possibilities.” Auditions were being held in France and Holland. The casting of a Dutch actress would not create a language problem, because “so much good English is spoken in Amsterdam. Many of the Dutch girls that we have heard from have written in very good English, and they wrote these letters themselves.”

  The main thing was to find a fresh face. Asked if it was true that he didn’t want a professional actress, Stevens replied, “We do want an actress that hasn’t found that secret out yet about herself.” He hoped this would not only be the girl’s first role, but her only role, so that she would be forever associated with the part “and perhaps not others.” She need not have a “facsimile resemblance” to Anne. More essential was spirit and “the flavor of Anne Frank in appearance.”

  They didn’t want another Shirley Temple, said Stevens, but someone like Shirley Temple in that “she must have charm, she must draw an audience to her, she must draw an audience’s affection and its sense of protection.” They were looking for a young girl, ideally around thirteen or fourteen. “She could play the younger part of the girl, and then when she puts on clothes, she will do what we often see in children that we know. When they wear their party dress and go out for the first time on a date, we see the youngster through the party dress.”

  Stevens had visited Amsterdam and talked to Mr. Frank, “an extraordinarily fine gentleman and a survivor of this misfortune.” There were plans to do some filming on location in Holland, and when word got out that a Dutch girl might be picked, thousands of letters poured in; around seventy girls had been chosen to audition. The winner, a young, half-Jewish dancer, was ultimately rejected in favor of Millie Perkins, a New Jersey-born Audrey Hepburn lookalike. A former Junior Miss model who had appeared on the cover of Seventeen, Perkins was discovered for the part, Lana Turner style, having a snack in a coffee shop with her sister.

  For her screen test, she told a story about going to the theater and being terribly annoyed by the people in front of her, a woman who threw her heavy fur coat on top of a little old lady, and a drunk who woke from snoring to guffaw at a serious drama. Aside from her physical resemblance to Hepburn, Millie Perkins’s most striking qualities are a brittle perkiness and a highly mannered affect. What she seemed to share with Anne was a mixture of confidence and terror, but a different confidence, and very different terrors.

  Perkins would go on to star, opposite Elvis, in Wild in the Country, then disappear from the screen to return, decades later, in more “mature” roles. She was briefly married to Dean Stock-well, and, in 1985, played the Virgin Mary in a TV miniseries. In the 2001 documentary about the filming of the diary, Echoes from the Past, Perkins recalls Otto Frank’s visit to the set.

  “He approved of me and believed in me,” she says. As tears come to her eyes, she falls silent and taps her nose, rapidly and repeatedly, then says, “You see I did care.”

  IN banner headlines, the trailer for the 1959 film promised its audience that “no greater suspense story has ever been told than…20th Century Fox’s masterful production of The Diary of Anne Frank! Here is the thrill of her first kiss! Here is the wonder of her youth! The excitement of her first love! The miracle of her laughter!” These promises are delivered on by the film itself, a psychological thriller in which the erotic tension leading to a first kiss races against the heroine’s inevitable capture by the Gestapo. Presumably, the final cut incorporated the audience responses from test screenings of the film; comment cards (preserved in the Anne Frank archive) asked viewers which scenes and actors they liked most, if any elements of the story were confusing or unclear, if they would recommend the picture to friends. One audience, in San Francisco, objected to an ending in which Anne was shown in a concentration camp, and the closing scene was recut so that Anne was given another chance to proclaim her faith in human goodness.

  Otto may have told Meyer Levin that the diary was not a war book, but George Stevens understood that war could keep the action moving. Faced by the problem of how to inject suspense into an essentially static story better suited to the stage, Stevens ramped up the danger outside the annex with footage of prisoners in striped uniforms and the sound of Nazi jackboots hitting the cobblestone streets. The merriment of the Hanukkah party is ended b
y the menacing hee-haw of Gestapo sirens. There are air raids, bombings, near misses. Dust and fragments of ceiling rain down on the cowering residents. The burglaries start earlier in the arc of the plot and take up considerable screen time. Anne’s dream of her starving, suffering friend Lies, altered in the play to an abstract nightmare from which Anne wakes in terror, has become a “dream sequence” in which a girl’s tormented face emerges from a background of female prisoners in striped suits.

  The film puts Hitler, curiously absent from the Goodrich-Hackett stage drama, back into the picture. His demented voice squawks from the contraband radio around which the annex residents cluster. Stevens compelled his actors to watch the footage he shot in Dachau, and used a recording of crowds shouting, “Heil, Hitler!” to evoke anxiety and fear.

  Despite Stevens’s efforts to immerse his cast in recent European history, the film seems even more “universal” than the play—that is, less about Jews. The script was sent for approval to the Jewish Advisory Council, an organization formed to monitor how Jews were portrayed on the big screen. Its director, John Stone, not only praised the screenplay but wrote that he preferred it to the play: “You have given the story an even more ‘universal’ meaning and appeal. It could very easily have been an outdated Jewish tragedy by less creative or more emotional handling—even a Jewish ‘Wailing Wall,’ and hence regarded as mere propaganda.”

  After the more disturbing scenes were filmed, Stevens played a loud recording of “The Purple People Eater” to dispel the tension and loosen everyone up. During the shoot, which lasted almost six months, the actors were subjected to a range of physical discomforts intended to re-create the miseries that the annex residents endured. The set was overheated for the summer scenes and excessively air conditioned when the action shifted to winter. Shelley Winters was required to gain fifteen pounds for her portrayal of Petronella van Daan, and then to lose the weight, together with her initially elaborate coiffure.

  Unlike the play, the film can step outside the annex, to the pretty streets of Amsterdam and zoom up to its placid sky, where the movie begins and ends to the swells and dips of Arnold Newman’s lush score. Yet Stevens was determined to convey the claustrophobia of life in hiding. This posed a challenge because the studio insisted that the production utilize its new CinemaScope technology, which had been developed in the hope that the wide screen would lure audiences back from the tiny windows of their brand-new TVs.

  Stevens’s solution was to have the set (the interiors were filmed on a sound stage) built vertically so that the camera could pan upward from the office to the garret, catching the annex residents as they wait, frozen with fear, at the top of the steps, or stand amid attic beams, as if they are in a tree house. Heavy supports were constructed and moved as necessary to narrowly frame the shots and counteract the wide CinemaScopic panorama.

  In close-up, every pore and imperfection becomes gigantic, and the differences among the actors—who appear to have traveled from different countries to act in different movies—are likewise magnified. Puzzling variations in manners, accent, and affect divide the German-born, aristocratic Franks and the Van Daans, who sound as if they have arrived in Amsterdam via the Bronx. Richard Beymer, who had mostly done TV roles and would go on to star as Tony in the film of West Side Story, plays Peter van Daan as a rebellious American teen walled up in a Dutch attic.

  Millie Perkins appears to have been directed to play Audrey Hepburn playing Anne Frank. Coy and frisky, she pouts, makes faces, and gives little indication of Anne’s intelligence and heart. In her memoir, Shelley Winters writes (mistakenly) that Anne knew nothing about the Holocaust. Had she missed the diary entry in which Anne wrote, “If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.”

  In the documentary about the making of the film, Millie Perkins admits, “I didn’t understand the area of the Gestapo and the Nazis.” Though she speaks in the Anglo-actressy diction that was Audrey Hepburn’s default accent, her voice has an American twang, a cultivated nasality, and at moments she stretches her vowels like the other, more patrician Hepburn, Katharine.

  Millie Perkins’s struggle underlines the obvious problems of casting an actress to play a character who ages between thirteen and fifteen—a time span during which a girl may feel, and behave, as if she is becoming another person. For all Stevens’s talk about the miracle that could be worked by dressing up a little girl and letting the audience glimpse the youngster through the party dress, the result was quite different. An eighteen-year-old dressed up in a child’s frock looks like an eighteen-year-old dressed up in a child’s frock. It’s disorienting and vaguely upsetting to see Anne clinging to her father or sitting with her arms wrapped around his neck and her head on his shoulder; the problem is that she looks like an adult. To accept this Anne as thirteen requires a nearly impossible suspension of disbelief. It’s easy to understand how an audience might be surprised to learn that they had been watching a true story.

  What was Stevens thinking? He was making a serious movie, coming as close as Hollywood would let him come to European auteurdom. Shot in black and white and dimly lit, the diary film was art. Besides, the American people needed to know what Jews had suffered during the war. What people had suffered.

  The documentary Echoes from the Past emphasizes the diary’s universality, the need to make Anne’s story “accessible to people all over the world.” Stevens “didn’t want the audience to think it happened only to Jewish people.” According to the documentary, “Stevens’s strategy of making the film accessible worldwide paid off” in the form of eight Oscar nominations. Neither a commercial hit nor an unmixed critical success, it won in two categories: Best Cinematography and Best Supporting Actress.

  Later, to fulfill a vow she made Otto Frank during his visit to the set, Shelley Winters proudly donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House Museum, where it is currently displayed in a small case outside the cafeteria. Winters was even prouder of persuading Stevens to restore a section of dialogue that was almost omitted. In the play, Peter wants to burn his Star of David, and Anne suggests that the yellow star is a badge of pride. Realizing that this exchange was missing from the film, Winters interrupted the shoot, angering Stevens, who was eventually mollified into a rewrite.

  “I watched him reshoot this scene in which Dick starts to burn his Jewish star, and Anne Frank whispers to him, ‘Don’t do that. After all, it’s David’s star—the shape of the shield of his victorious army.’ This little moment in the film is extraordinary—the two terrified Jewish children, who are hiding from the Nazis, remembering their heritage of the powerful King David. I will always be proud that I had the courage to stop the filming and see that that moment was restored to the film.”

  As in the play, Anne’s question about why Jews have been singled out to suffer has been changed so that she asks why people have had to suffer, first one race, then another. Perhaps because Millie Perkins is so unsure, it’s a clumsy moment that nearly brings the film to a stop. You feel as if the actress can’t get beyond some problem with this line, and after a beat of hesitation, she sounds as if she’s faking it, or lying.

  The ending of the movie is also problematic. Anne leans against Peter as they gaze out the attic window. “Some day when we get outside again…,” Anne says as the police sirens get louder. Cut to worried adults downstairs, also hearing the sirens, cut back to the lovers staring up at the sky, cut to a truck rumbling down the street. The syrupy music surges under the screech of brakes. The lovers meet in a passionate embrace—“Here is the thrill of her first kiss!”—intensified by the fact that the Gestapo has arrived. The front doorbell rings, Mr. Van Daan faints, there’s the sound of crashing, of shouting in German, more crashing, someone’s breaking down the door. And the music gets louder. The secret annex residents form a
tableau of nobility—eight brave, resigned statues awaiting the inevitable. Peter comes up behind Anne and rests one hand on her shoulder.

  “For the past two years,” declares Otto Frank, “we have lived in fear. Now we can live in hope.” Hope for what, exactly? Already the scene has shifted to a close-up of the diary, and we hear Anne reading, in voice-over, a passage that does not appear in the diary, an entry she would never have written, even if it had been possible for her to write anything at that dreadful moment.

  “And so it seems our stay here is over. They’ve given us just a moment to get our things. We can each take a bag, whatever will hold our clothing, nothing else. So, dear diary, that means I must leave you behind. Good-bye for a while…Please, please, anyone, if you should find this diary, please keep it safe for me, because someday I hope…”

  And so it seems our stay here is over. Our stay here?

  Returned from the war, Otto Frank enters the attic with the two helpers, who explain why they were absent on the day the annex residents were taken away. In reality, as we know, they were in the office, and Kleiman and Kugler were arrested along with the Jews; presumably, their presence at that critical moment was edited out to simplify the scene and heighten its dramatic impact. Otto tells his Dutch friends about the camps, about his journey home, about looking for his family among so many others searching for loved ones.

  “But Anne…I still hoped. Yesterday I was in Rotterdam, I met a woman there, she’d been in Belsen with Anne. I know now….” The music swells again, the camera zooms up for a wide shot of clouds and swooping seagulls, and we hear Anne repeating that, in spite of everything, she still believes that people are good at heart.