Cinema
Child of Her Time
By ISABEL QUIGLY The Diary of Anne Frank. (Carlton.) THE prisoner's scribble on the wall : Anne Frank's diary is that, immensely elaborated, with the scarcely bearable pathos of a true and half-hope- ful story whose terrible ending we know. There is always something moving about any personal record of suffering; even illegible scratches of anguish might seem so, if you knew who made them and why. Anne Frank's diary is not just the record of a particular experience : it is an extraordinarily vivid piece of self- portraiture. This Jewish child cooped up for over two years a early adolescence in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis lived on in a way that is at once individual and generic : as herself, a par- ticular girl, talented, enormously attractive, a born observer and reporter; and as any adolescent girl growing through the difficulties and languors of her age in conditions that intensified every Impres- sion : narrow, claustrophobic conditions that could not retard her progress into life but heightened everything she felt, almost as if she knew her time for feeling was short.
The film The Diary of Anne Frank (director : George Stevens; 'U' certificate) is a decent effort to make, out of this fresh and candidly self- revealing diary, a piece of high drama, something big in CinemaScope and 'the wonder of Stereo- phonic sound' to suit the director of Giant. The result is a fairish war film and social document but it is hardly Anne Frank : the idiom is too American, the style too inflated, the direction in the wrong sense too 'careful,' too reverent and contrived. Too soon Anne Frank is seen as a little heroine aureoled with dewiness and disaster; whereas the real girl in the diary is tougher than that —a child of her time and situation. Part of the trouble is that Millie Perkins, a pretty ex-model, chosen out of all America as Anne Frank, is too old, too cute, and far too much of a model. She is 11 believe) nineteen, and more or less looks it; certainly, though at first sight spindly and childish, she lacks the undefined softness of the early teens, that air of not quite deciding which feature (if any) may turn out beautiful. Anne's age (thirteen tq fif- teen) is a difficult one to fake : it is not achieved by Putting on a few coltish movements as if they were a hair style or a hat. And charming though Miss Perkins might seem elsewhere, in this par- ticular case she seems to me a mock-child, almost a slightly monstrous moppet, a quaint and interest- ing caricature of reality like Bernhardt as Hamlet or Mary Pickford as Little Lord Fauntleroy. Rather in the same way, the rest of the film, though no doubt conscientiously authentic in the details of appearance and furniture, fails to con- vince one as a whole because of nationalistic oddities. Accents vary absurdly. Anne talks very broad American, her father (Joseph Schildkraut) a sort of quiet 'European' English, her mother (Gusti Huber) strongly accented 'foreign' English. The other lodgers in the attic speak in their various ways, a medley of voices that does more to suggest polyglots than a pair of united Dutch families. If they had all spoken like Anne or all in 'foreign' English like Mrs. Frank, it might have given them some sort of unity.
And it is long : nearly three hours. To say that Anne's was a long ordeal is not to excuse the film, which must bring her ordeal to life in other ways than by making the audience keep glancing at the clock. The day-to-day record of growth and spiritual progress is not necessarily dramatic : the film has been honest in sticking pretty closely to the text, but it has not managed to make it filmable—at least at that length. Best are the action parts, where you wait, like the Franks and Van Deans, for, the cat to make a noise that will betray them to the burglar below. Anne's feelings for the boy Peter (generic rather than individual, in the circumstances of their isolation) are shown with a delicacy that comes near to prissiness ; again, adolescence seen from above, from the other viewpoint : 'young love in quota- tion marks. In fact the whole of this painstaking, honest but inadequate film seems to have been made in quotation marks : 'heroism,' suffering," 'pathos,' it seems to say; and somehow misses the amazingly vivid young thing that wrote without them, with the freedom and vigour her life denied her.
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