Several victims of the Holocaust lived to write memorable accounts of their terrible captivity, but in popular culture, a young girl who did not survive left the most famous eyewitness narrative. After its posthumous publication, The Diary of Anne Frank became a stage play and then a 1959 film by Oscar-winning director George Stevens (Giant, A Place in the Sun). The 50th Anniversary Edition is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
Shot largely in a claustrophobic replica of the attic where a benevolent Dutch businessman hid the Franks and other Jews, the movie captures the deportation of Amsterdam’s Jewry from an adolescent girl’s perspective. First she was made to wear a yellow star marking her for repression. Then she was she was forbidden to attend school. Soon enough, her bicycle was taken away. Her family escaped to their precarious refuge just in time. “I’m living a great adventure,” she wrote. It was to be her last.
Stevens’ film depicts the tense anticipation of life in the attic above a workplace. The Jews had to remain still on weekdays until closing time. One stray sound could have betrayed them. Stevens doesn’t shirk from showing the tensions between the people in the attic, and Anne Frank’s own precocious exuberance. Filmed in black in white, The Diary of Anne Frank puts the dark shadows to good use.
