All Frank's writings to her diary were addressed as "Dear Kitty". It was published after the end of the war by her father, Otto Frank (played in the film by Joseph Schildkraut, who was also Jewish). His entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust. The interiors were shot in Los Angeles on a sound stage duplicate of the Amsterdam factory, with exteriors filmed at the actual building.[3]
In 1945, Otto Frank returns to Amsterdam after World War II ended. After climbing the stairs to a deserted garret, he is joined and comforted by Miep Gies and Mr. Kraler, office workers who shielded him and his family from the Nazis. Otto begins to search for the diary written by his youngest daughter, Anne. Miep promptly retrieves it for him and he receives solace reading the words written by Anne three years earlier.
The action moves back to July 1942, and Anne begins by writing of the restrictions placed upon Jews that drove the Franks into hiding over the spice factory. Sharing the Franks' hiding place is the Van Daans and their teenage son, Peter. Kugler, who works in the office below, and Miep, his assistant, have arranged the hideaway and warn the families that they must maintain strict silence during daylight hours while the workers are there. Kraler delivers food and a box for Anne compiled by Otto, which contains her beloved photos of movie stars and a blank diary.
As the months pass, Anne Frank’s irrepressible energy reasserts itself and she constantly teases Peter, whose only attachment is to his cat, Mouschi. Otto schools Anne and her sister, Margot, while Mrs. Van Daan passes the time by recounting fond memories of her youth and possesses the fur coat given by her father. The strain of confinement causes the Van Daans to argue and pits Anne against her mother, Edith. One day, Kraler brings a radio to the attic, providing the families with ears to the world. Soon after, he asks them to take in another person, a Jewish dentist named Albert Dussell, who recounts the dire conditions outside, in which Jews suddenly disappear and are shipped to the concentration camps, and confirms the disappearance of many of their friends.
One night, Anne dreams of seeing one of her friends in a concentration camp and wakes up screaming. In October 1942, news came of the Allied landing in Africa but the bombing of Amsterdam intensified. During Hanukkah, Van Daan abruptly announces that Peter must get rid of Mouschi because he consumes too much food. Their argument is cut short when they hear a prowler break in the front door and the room falls silent, only when Peter crashes into an object on the floor while trying to catch Mouschi. The startled thief grabs a typewriter and flees. A watchman notices the break-in and summons two police officers, who search the premises, until Mouschi knocks a plate from the sink, reassuring them that the noise was caused by a common cat and they leave. Otto, hoping to foster faith and courage, leads everyone in a Hanukkah song.
In January 1944, Anne begins to attract Peter's attention while Miep brings the group a cake. Then Van Daan asks Miep to sell Petronella's fur coat so that he can buy cigarettes. Kraler warns that one of his employees asked for a raise and implies that something strange is going on in the attic, which Dussell dourly comments that it is just a matter of time before they are discovered. Anne blames the adults for the war which has destroyed all sense of hope and ideals and storms out of the room, where Peter follows and comforts her. Later, Anne confides her dreams of becoming a writer and Peter voices frustration about his inability to join the war effort.
One morning, Van Daan tries to steal some bread from the others but Edith catches him and denounces him, ordering him and his family to leave. As Dussell and Mrs. Van Daan quarrel over food, word comes over the radio of the Allied invasion of France and Mr. Van Daan breaks into tears of shame. Heartened by the news, everyone apologizes for their harsh words, and Anne dreams of being back in school by the fall.
By July 1944, the invasion had bogged down and Kraler was hospitalized with ulcers. Upon hearing that the police have found the stolen typewriter, Anne writes that her diary provides her with a way to go on living after her death. The Van Daans begin to quarrel once more, and Peter declares that he cannot tolerate the situation and Anne soothes him by reminding him of the goodness of those who have come to their aid. Their conversation is interrupted by the sirens of an approaching police truck. Certain of their impending arrest, they passionately kiss. As the German uniformed police break down the premises and the bookcase entrance, Otto declares they no longer have to live in fear but can go forward in hope.
Back in 1945, Otto tells Miep and Kraler about his long journey home after his release from Auschwitz. He learned about the deaths of Edith, Margot, the Van Daans, and Dussell, and he hopes that Anne had somehow survived until he sadly reveals that he met a woman who had been in Bergen-Belsen with Anne and confirmed her death. He then glances at Anne's diary and reads, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart," and reflects upon her unshakeable optimism.
Otto Frank wrote to Audrey Hepburn, asking her if she would play the part of his daughter Anne. He told Hepburn that his daughter would have been honoured to have such a famous Hollywood actress play her on film, and he also noted the striking resemblance that existed between Anne and Hepburn when she was an adolescent. She was initially interested in the role, and her name appears on the back cover of copies of the diary printed and sold to promote the "upcoming film".
During the casting period, Hepburn ultimately wrote back declining the offer, saying she felt she was too old, and lacked the skills to portray Anne. She said she was greatly honoured to have been given the choice, and noted the similarity between her own war experience and that of the Franks and the others in the annex.[5][6] Hepburn and Anne were born within a month of each other in May and June 1929, and both spent their adolescences in Nazi-occupied Holland. The role went to American newcomer Millie Perkins.
Production
The film's trailer
The film is an adaptation of the successful Broadway play based on Anne Frank's diary, which was first published in English in 1952. At the time of the film's production, the book had already sold millions of copies around the world.
According to a 1955 article published on the Daily Variety, Garson Kanin, who had staged the Broadway play, and Milton Sperling from Warner Bros. had intended to acquire the film rights, but ultimately they were sold to Buddy Adler of 20th Century-Fox. Originally, William Wyler was in talks to direct before George Stevens signed on as producer and director.
Principal photography took place from 5 March to 11 August 1958, with additional scenes shot in November. Location work was done in Amsterdam, while the set of the annex was constructed at the 20th Century-Fox Studios in Los Angeles.[7] George Stevens initially resisted the idea of shooting the film in CinemaScope because he thought that this format would not convey the claustrophobic effect he wanted to reproduce. When Spyros Skouras, president of 20th Century-Fox, insisted on CinemaScope, Stevens and cinematographer William C. Mellor decided to reduce the space by limiting the action to the center of the screen. Mellor further developed the look of the film by using fluorescent tubes, filters and gas[clarification needed] rather than traditional studio lighting.
Premiere
The film premiered March 18, 1959, at the Palace Theatre in New York City.[8]
Reception
Critical reception
The film was mostly positively received by critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 81% of 21 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10.[9]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 59 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[10]
Variety, in its review on December 31, 1958, stated: "The Diary of Anne Frank...is a film of often extraordinary quality. It manages, within the framework of a tense and tragic situation, to convey the beauty of a young and inquiring spirit that soars beyond the cramped confinement of the Frank family's hideout in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
"And yet, with all its technical perfection, the inspired direction and the sensitivity with which many of the scenes are handled, Diary is simply too long. Everything possible is done to keep the action moving within its narrow, cluttered space, and a remarkable balance is achieved between stark terror and comedy relief, yet there are moments when the film lags and the dialog becomes forced. Unlike the play, the picture leaves too little to the imagination."[11]
Of Shelley Winters, the Academy Award winner for Best Supporting Actress, Variety stated: "As the Van Daan couple, Shelley Winters and Lou Jacobi come up with vivid characterizations that score on all levels." [12]
In his New York Times review on March 19, 1959, Bosley Crowther stated: "GEORGE STEVENS' motion picture rendering of "The Diary of Anne Frank" is so good, so substantially sound and eloquent of so many ideas and moods that it genuinely grieves this observer to have to come out and say that it lacks the capstone strength of spiritual splendor in the projection of the Anne Frank role. Mr. Stevens has done a superb job of putting upon the screen the basic drama and shivering authenticity of the Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett play, which in turn caught the magnitude of drama in the real-life diary of a Jewish girl. He has brilliantly flowed a three-hour picture through an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and etched a harrowing ordeal for survival in the brave behavior of eight Jews hiding there.
"...Mr. Stevens was able to get on the CinemaScope screen a sense of the closeness of the drama and hold it for as long as he does. The doings of eight bourgeois people in such cramped quarters for more than two years would seem to defy intense inspection and rapt anxiety for nigh three hours (two hours and fifty minutes precisely) via the techniques of this fluid medium. Yet Mr. Stevens has done it. With successive superbly detailed scenes that convey the cluttered, claustrophobic nature of that hideout in Amsterdam, he has developed a slow heat of friction among the people secluded there and frequent hot fusions of mental torment when discovery threatens from downstairs."[13]
The film was first released on DVD on February 3, 2004. The special features included some of the following; "The Diary of Anne Frank: Echoes From the Past" featurette, a press conference with director George Stevens, MovieTone news announcing public appearances by Millie Perkins, a screen test, and an audio commentary by Millie Perkins and George Stevens Jr, the director's son.
A fiftieth-anniversary edition of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 16, 2009, three months after its actual release anniversary, in commemoration of what would have been Anne Frank's 80th birthday. It included seven major new featurettes: three cast interviews, a behind-the scenes look at the score, two short documentaries about George Stevens' memories from the war and the history of the diary, and a perspective piece on the film's legacy by Thomas Rothman.[22]
The Blu-ray was released only a month before Tony van Renterghem died on July 19, 2009.[23] Renterghem, a Dutch cinematographer and technical, historical and script adviser who worked with Stevens for many years, consulted on both the play and the film.[23] While his work was almost entirely behind the scenes, his knowledge helped in putting together the historical featurettes.[original research?]
Otto Heinrich Frank was the father of Anne Frank. He edited and published the first edition of her diary in 1947 and advised on its later theatrical and cinematic adaptations. In the 1950s and the 1960s, he established European charities in his daughter's name and founded the trust which preserved his family's wartime hiding place, the Anne Frank House, in Amsterdam.
Hermine "Miep" Gies was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family and four other Dutch Jews from the Nazis in an annex above Otto Frank's business premises during World War II. She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of eleven, she was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family in Leiden to whom she became very attached. Although she was only supposed to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which Gies chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands.
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary documenting her life in hiding amid Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. A celebrated diarist, Frank described everyday life from her family's hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. She gained fame posthumously and became one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, which documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944. It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
Anne Frank Remembered is a 1995 British documentary film produced and directed by Jon Blair about the life and posthumously published diary of the German-Jewish diarist Anne Frank, who spent most of her life in the Netherlands. The film was produced in association with the Anne Frank House, Disney Channel, and the BBC, and features narration by Kenneth Branagh and extracts from Frank's diary read by Glenn Close. It originally aired on television in April 1995 before it was screened theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics in February 1996.
The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Anne's diaries were retrieved by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep gave them to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only survivor, just after the Second World War was over.
Friedrich "Fritz" Pfeffer was a German dentist and Jewish refugee who hid with Anne Frank and her family and the Van Pels family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He perished in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Northern Germany. Pfeffer was given the pseudonym Albert Dussel in Frank's diary, and remains known as such in many editions and adaptations of the publication.
Jan Augustus Gies was a member of the Dutch Resistance who, with his wife, Miep, helped hide Anne Frank, her sister Margot, their parents Otto and Edith, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer from Nazi persecution during the occupation of the Netherlands by aiding them as they resided in the Secret Annex.
Victor Kugler was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, Het Achterhuis, known in English as The Diary of a Young Girl, he was referred to under the pseudonym Mr. Kraler.
Johannes Kleiman was one of the Dutch residents who helped hide Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In the published version of Frank's diary, Het Achterhuis, known in English as The Diary of a Young Girl, he is given the pseudonym Mr. Koophuis. In some later publications of the diary, the pseudonym was removed, and Kleiman was referred to by his real name.
Elisabeth "Bep" Voskuijl was a resident of Amsterdam who helped conceal Anne Frank and her family from Nazi persecution during the occupation of the Netherlands. In the early versions of Het Achterhuis, known in English as The Diary of a Young Girl, she was given the pseudonym "Elli Vossen".
The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank is a 1988 television film directed by John Erman. It is based on Miep Gies's 1988 book Anne Frank Remembered. The film was broadcast as part of an ad hoc network, Kraft Golden Showcase Network. Playwright William Hanley received an Emmy for his script. The film premiered on CBS on April 17, 1988.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a stage adaptation of the posthumously published 1947 book The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. It premiered on Broadway at the Cort Theatre in 1955. Its script also primarily formed the basis of the Academy Award-winning 1959 film adaptation.
The Anne Frank House is a writer's house and biographical museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank. The building is located on a canal called the Prinsengracht, close to the Westerkerk, in central Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a BBC adaptation, in association with France 2, of The Diary of a Young Girl originally written by Anne Frank from 1942 to 1944 and adapted for television by Deborah Moggach.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a 1980 American made-for-television biographical drama film which originally aired on NBC on November 17, 1980. Like the 1959 film of the same title, it was written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and directed by Boris Sagal. Unlike the 1959 film, the TV-film focuses more on character development than suspense, and is considerably shorter than the 1959 version. In this version, Melissa Gilbert plays Anne Frank.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a 1967 TV film based on the posthumously published 1947 book The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. The teleplay was directed by Alex Segal and it was adapted by James Lee from the 1955 play of the same name by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. The film starred Max von Sydow, Diana Davila, Peter Beiger, Theodore Bikel and Lilli Palmer.
The Diary of Anne Frank is 1987 BBC television miniseries. It was based on The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and it starred Katharine Schlesinger as Frank, with the cast also including Elizabeth Bell, Janet Amsbury, and Emrys James. It was directed by Gareth Davies and produced by Terrance Dicks.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is an original radio play by author Meyer Levin (1905–1981). It was adapted from Levin's original stage dramatization of the same name, adapted from The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank's 1942-1944 diary that was posthumously published in 1947. It aired on CBS on September 18, 1952, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, to critical acclaim, and again in November 1952.
Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank is a 2016 German drama film directed by German filmmaker Hans Steinbichler and written by Fred Breinersdorfer. It stars Lea van Acken as the titular character, Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Noethen, and Stella Kunkat. The film is based on Anne Frank's famous diary and tells the story of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who went into hiding with her family in Amsterdam and became a victim of the Holocaust.
References
↑ Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN978-0-8108-4244-1. p252
↑ "1959: Probable Domestic Take", Variety, 6 January 1960 p 34
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