30th Anniversary Showing of Original ‘Anne Frank’ at Bing

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of George Stevens’ “The Diary of Anne Frank” LACMA will present the film Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Bing Theater in its original roadshow version, which has been out of circulation for three decades and is 20 minutes longer than the cut that went into general release.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” stands the test of time magnificently. In replicating meticulously the tall old building in Amsterdam in which Anne Frank, her family and others hid from the Nazis for over two years, Stevens left off one side, which allowed him to move the camera swiftly from floor to floor, letting us see what the Franks et al could only hear from their split-level attic. Stevens puts what sounds like a theatrical device to an intensely cinematic effect, and it is typical of the imagination with which he and writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett adapted their play, based on Frank’s diary, to the screen. The film is never stagy, yet we experience both the claustrophobia of those in hiding and the soaring of Anne’s poetic imagination, which knew no walls.

The film is at once the story of an exceptional individual’s coming of age and the study of eight people living in constant fear and in cramped quarters but managing to hold on to their humanity and to live their lives with as much meaning and fullness as possible. There have been many Holocaust dramas and documentaries since this film was released, but time has only increased the impact of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and underlined its tragedy.

The cast is ensemble playing at its best. There was considerable controversy at the time in the casting of the non-Jewish Millie Perkins as Anne, but she is certainly radiant and captivating. Joseph Schildkraut and Gusti Huber are Anne’s parents, figures of enormous strength and dignity. Shelley Winters is the vulgar but kindly Mrs. Van Daan, and Ed Wynn is Dussell, a gentle but crotchety and pessimistic elderly dentist. Rounding out the attic’s inhabitants are Lou Jacobi as the portly Van Daan, Richard Beymer as his teen-age son and Diane Baker as Anne’s older, more reserved sister. Their benefactors are played by Douglas Spencer, proprietor of the building’s spice factory, and his secretary Miep (Dody Heath). We soon forget the cast’s variety of accents.

The romantic and creative yearnings of Anne, who is 13 when she goes into hiding, play against the film’s frequent suspense, which occurs most agonizingly when Spencer’s office is robbed not once but twice while the antics of Beymer’s cat threaten to expose the hiding place. Punctuating the daily lives of the Franks and their friends are air raids, the sound of Nazi soldiers marching on cobblestone streets and the ominous siren of the Black Marias in which the Nazis round up the Jews. In the face of unceasing peril and uncertainty Anne somehow was able to summon within herself the faith to confide to her diary that “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.”

Information: (213) 857-6010.