Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
The true, harrowing story of a young Jewish girl who, with her family and their friends, is forced into hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
George Stevens' adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play carries tremendous emotional weight, anchored by Millie Perkins' earnest Anne and a superb supporting cast including Shelley Winters in her Oscar-winning role. The plotting is necessarily stagey, reflecting its theatrical origins, and the widescreen black-and-white cinematography is competent but rarely transcendent. The story itself, being rooted in historical record, follows a known and inevitable trajectory, limiting dramatic novelty, though the film was distinctive in bringing the Holocaust to mainstream American cinema at a time when such subject matter was rarely tackled. The ending — the family's discovery and deportation — lands with devastating, restrained power, letting historical reality do the heavy lifting without melodrama.