Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film

8 The One Who Cannot Be Left Behind: The Diary of Anne Frank [Includes Image Plates]

8 The One Who Cannot Be Left Behind The Diary of Anne Frank History is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas. —Cathy Caruth Forgive me, they haven’t given me the name “little bundle of contradictions” for nothing! —Anne Frank, Friday, July 21, 1944 After directing two successful films situated in the American west, Stevens turned his attention back to Europe to direct what appeared to be a more intimate story, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s Pulitzerwinning Broadway play, The Diary of Anne Frank, the story of a thirteenyear -old Jewish girl who hid with her family from the Nazis for two years. Anne Frank then was sent to a concentration camp where she died just before her fifteenth birthday, two months before the war ended. In 1954, before he began shooting Giant, Stevens signed a two-picture contract (which then turned into a one-picture deal) with Twentieth Century Fox, and when he learned that the studio owned the Anne Frank property, he was convinced that he should be the one to direct it. It had been more 230 than a decade since he returned from Europe and now he finally had material for what was truly his war film. It is understandable that the writings of this young Jewish girl would touch Stevens given his experiences at the Dachau concentration camp. More than that, he believed that Anne’s diary was an important cultural document, ironic testimony that Anne had outlived Hitler’s plan to empty Europe of its Jewish population. Stevens’s film on Anne Frank would be the first commercial picture to bring up the Holocaust, albeit indirectly , from within the walls of the Secret Annex where Anne and her family hid. In approaching The Diary of Anne Frank, however, Stevens was forced to confront memories of his experiences at the concentration camps in 1945 that he may not have wanted to revisit so pointedly. A few years after the war he and his friend, attorney Vincent Hallinan, sat down to watch some of the color footage Stevens shot in Dachau; they could take only a few minutes of it before turning it off and Stevens relegated the footage to his Bekins storage in North Hollywood, California . Now, confronting the experience again, thirteen years later, he averted his eyes from the horror of the camps as much as he could—and as much as the 1950s would impel him to do. No one was ready yet to talk about the Holocaust. But when Stevens did look closely at Anne Frank and the diary she produced, he learned a large lesson: that not only was his life inextricably caught up with Anne’s, but so were other lives in the audience implicated in the trauma of that one defining moment in history . In his film he would try to find an aesthetic to express the power of that inclusive moment in history. At Dachau Stevens’s reaction was not unlike that of other Americans who entered the camps at the end of the war. Deborah Lipstadt recorded interviews with American news correspondents who spoke about their first reactions upon seeing the concentration camps: “Even now that correspondents were witnessing the grim results of the Final Solution, they could not grasp what they were seeing. . . . They found it difficult to admit to themselves—and their readers—what they were witnessing. . . . They did not associate what they were now seeing in these camps, where most of the survivors were Jews.” Not only could the correspondents not talk about what they saw, they could not even “grasp” it.1 There was something terrible, evil even, found there. It was only years later that The One Who Cannot Be Left Behind 231 • Stevens was able to describe its pervasiveness: “Of all the outrages of human nature [that] bring these latent and deep-rooted emotions to the surface . . . [there is] nothing like a concentration camp. Everything evil will be exposed in a day . . . it’s deplorable because it undercuts one terribly . . . . The [German] army, what they stood for was the worst, worst possible thing that’s happened in centuries.”2 The country, the world, was caught up in a collective gasp that soon settled into a refusal to discuss publicly what occurred in the camps. The event that came to define the darkest moments of the century was still too immediate...