TIMELINE: THE FORTIES: THE LAST FIVE YEARS

THE SLOW DECLINE OF THE SYSTEM

1945 By the end of May, armistice had been achieved in Europe. Hollywood’s film community naively assumed that at wars’ end its supremacy as the sole purveyors of mass entertainment would be restored. Their output for the year reflected this optimism. State Fair, a glossy remake of the old Will Rogers film with new songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and co-starring the winsome Jean Crain as a fresh faced farm girl who finds love on the midway in the arms of news hound Dana Andrews, was a big winner for Fox. Popular too was Cornel Wilde’s turn as Chopin in A Song to Remember. Unfortunately, no amount of musical prowess could stop Warner Brothers’ costly Rhapsody in Blue from becoming a box office flop.

MGM threw all its resources behind Anchors Aweigh – an effervescent musical that marked the film debut of Frank Sinatra. It was nominated as Best Picture but lost to The Lost Weekend – a grim depiction of alcoholism; perhaps foreshadowing the fact that audiences were starting to demand more realism from their motion pictures.

Treacle was still in: Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s was a magnificent tear jerker that rang registers around the country. Hitchcock dazzled once again with Spellbound. Ingrid Bergman’s involvement in that film won her the Best Actress New York Film Critic honors. Joan Crawford – who had been labeled a has-been by L.B. Mayer at MGM, migrated to Warner Brothers and won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Mildred Pierce, a greatly sanitized version of the scathing James Cain novel.

Actress Olivia deHavilland won her landmark case against alma mater Warner Brothers. Charging that she had been strong armed into a contract extension of six months (to compensate for her suspension), the Supreme Court ruled that the maximum term any studio could ‘hold’ a star under contract was seven years – including periods of suspension.

Total unknown, Hurd Hatfield burst onto the screen with a resounding success in The Picture of Dorian Gray – a salacious melodrama about a young man whose wicked debaucheries in life ravage his portrait though not his corps. Even fresh-faced Deanna Durbin eschewed her usual cheery conventions for Lady on a Train – a murder mystery in which Ms. Durbin nevertheless found several choice moments to sing.

Zanuck managed a minor coup with The House on 92nd Street, a film shot on location in and around Washington D.C. and afforded audiences unprecedented access to the inner workings of the F.B.I. One of the most impressive yet underrated achievements of the year was Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock – a poignant war time romance that did solid box office. Rory Calhoun became the latest beefcake heartthrob – mostly for his shirtless fight scene in Nob Hill. Danny Kaye did it better - strictly for laughs in the comedy of errors; Wonder Man. Memorable character actors, Alla Nazimova and Gabby Hayes died.

1946 Apart from William Wyler’s poignant account of returning war veterans, The Best Years of Our Lives (which took home the Best Picture Oscar) the year was marked by a decidedly indifferent batch of film product that generally failed to catch the public’s fascination in anything but moderate box office returns. MGM’s grandiose anniversary flick, Ziegfeld Follies became a super production mired in bad taste; a hodgepodge of stars cavorting in garish costumes on gaudy sets. On the whole, the studio’s other musical offering; Till The Clouds Roll By faired much better – both artistically and financially. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City served a two fold purpose: it introduced Italian actress Anna Magnani to American audiences and ushered in the influential post-war neo-classic style in film making.

Laurence Olivier produced, starred and directed Henry V – more an artistic than financial triumph. In Hollywood, The Yearling, costarring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman was a particularly bit of homespun fluff (about a boy and his deer) that caught on. Fox and director John Ford produced the seminal western My Darling Clementine. Warner Brothers and Joan Crawford continued their lucrative association with Humoresque, the May/December embittered tale of tempestuous love between a haughty diva and her headstrong violinist. The noir cycle was in full swing with Rita Hayworth’s scintillating Gilda and Hitchcock’s sublime espionage thriller, Notorious. The on screen chemistry between Lana Turner and John Garfield scorched the screen in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, even though their behind the scenes animosity proved that mutual romantic admiration a myth.

On the whole, one of Hollywood’s best loved genres – the musical was not performing up to expectation. Disney’s attempt at a live action/animated feature – Song of the South played upon black stereotypes and good natured fables for its fodder, but was only a minor success. MGM’s lavish Du Barry Was A Lady flopped: ditto for Warner’s Night and Day – a thoroughly fictionalized account of composer Cole Porter’s life.

Frank Capra produced and directed It’s a Wonderful Life for his own co-founded Liberty Films. The film’s tepid box office response effectively closed the fledgling studio. Though sumptuously mounted, both RKO’s Caesar and Cleopatra and 20th Century Fox’s The Razor’s Edge were only moderately received. Fox’s other lavish epic of the year, Anna and the King of Siam made Britain’s Rex Harrison an international heartthrob – nicknamed ‘sexy Rexy’. The artistic community mourned the losses of character actor George Arliss and cynical comedian W.C. Fields.

1947 can effectively be considered a year of considerable change in the status quo of making movies. In hindsight, director Ernest Lubitsch’s death seems to have marked the bitter end of Hollywood’s carefree romantic champagne. The production code was revised to explicitly ban any movie from illustrating a crime unless the reprobates in question were depicted as paying a price for their indiscretion. Charlie Chaplin was branded un-American by HUAC. The committee also blacklisted director Edward Dmytrk for his involvement on Crossfire.

Though the industry desperately tried to hang on to its supremacy – its failure to adapt with changing times resulted in many films that – although made with the best of intentions, were quite out of step with public tastes. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s usually solid teaming floundered in The Sea of Grass. The costume melodrama, Song of Love (also with Hepburn) failed to catch on. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. tried to relive his father’s glory in Sinbad the Sailor – and was decried as inferior in all respects.

The Hollywood studios continued to be dominated by their tyrannical moguls and top heavy producer model. But the biggest news in the industry was the invasion of Brit’ J. Arthur Rank. A prolific tycoon, Rank had effectively telescoped Universal International’s merger with United World Pictures. At home, Rank was also busy constructing his own filmic empire – responsible for a litany of crafted product well received on both continents. Odd Man Out, Black Narcissus, This Happy Breed and adaptations of Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations were intercontinental successes.

At Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck’s dream factory had an uneven slate of projects. Zanuck scored a financial and critical success with his critique of anti-Semitism in Gentlemen’s Agreement, though in retrospect, RKO’s more modestly budgeted (and like themed) Crossfire seems a more effective film. Fox also had an unlikely hit with A Miracle on 34th Street – unlikely because the Christmas film was unceremoniously dumped on the market in mid-July, but managed to become the summer season’s runaway hit – all about a department store Santa who thinks he’s the real deal. Three best selling novels were transformed into three extremely disappointing movies: The Late George Apley, The Egg and I and Forever Amber. The latter was a costly flop about a maniacal courtesan played by Fox lovely, Linda Darnell. However, most of Amber’s naughtiness had been usurped by the censors.

Marlene Dietrich had a thoroughly abysmal failure on her hands with Golden Earrings in which she played a gypsy princess. Cary Grant faired reasonably well with The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer – a quaint family comedy about a young girl’s infatuation with a middle age lady’s man. Joan Crawford continued her upswing at Warner Brothers in Possessed, the tale of a mentally deranged woman on the verge of a breakdown. Charlie Chaplin’s perverse little comedy, Monsieur Verdoux outraged most critics – not for its content, but because Chaplin was by this point branded a communist by HUAC.

1948 Laurence Olivier briefly made Bill Shakespeare’s prose (and acting in tights) fashionable again with his Oscar-winning Hamlet. From Britain also came Moira Shearer’s international debut in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes – a ballet orientated film about the tragic dichotomy between love and art. From France, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast was an effective rendering of the fairytale with sumptuous sets and lavish costumes. However, this verve for the classics did not rub off on Columbia’s The Loves of Carmen – an expensive but abysmal Hollywood update of Bizet’s tale, this time starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Ill-received too was Ingrid Bergman’s performance as the title character in Joan of Arc.

The New York Film Critics gave their accolades to Warner Brother’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – one of two landmark Bogart pictures of the year (the other being, Key Largo). The novel Treasure of the Sierra Madre was written by B. Traven – a man more myth than flesh and blood and equally elusive after cameras had stopped rolling. Orson Welles infuriated Columbia President, Harry Cohn by bleaching Rita Hayworth’s trademark red tresses blonde for The Lady from Shanghai; another attempt by Welles at greatness that was sadly butchered by cuts after Welles had departed the studio. The film was unceremoniously dumped on the market to lackluster reviews and public response though, like many of Welles’ films, it is today considered a classic.

Darryl F. Zanuck continued his relentless pursuit of stories with substance with The Snake Pit – a critical examination of mental illness and asylums. Barbara Stanwyck convincingly portrayed an invalid who overhears, but is unable to intervene in, a murder plot in Sorry Wrong Number. Ray Milland played a man wrongfully accused of murder in the noir thriller, The Big Clock. Larger than life John Wayne and newcomer to films Montgomery Clift spared against the viral backdrop of Indian country in Red River.

On the lighter side, and from MGM, came Easter Parade – Fred Astaire’s most delightful post RKO teaming with the studio’s own musical titan, Judy Garland. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were back on top with Frank Capra’s State of the Union – a scathing political comedy/drama. But the outstanding acting performance by an actress this year was Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda. Playing a deaf mute, Wyman managed to convey a sensitivity and sensibility in her performance. One of the most influential of all Hollywood pioneers, David W. Griffith died alone and forgotten. Death also claimed the lives of Dame May Whitty, King Baggot and one of Hollywood’s most promising young stars, Carole Landis who committed suicide with an overdose of seconal at the age of 29. She had 49 films to her credit.

1949 The decade concluded on a rather dower note of distinction. While several of the year’s offerings were noteworthy for their examination of racial issues (Pinky, Intruder in the Dust, Home of the Brave), the bulk of the yearly output played it safe with mediocre themes, and, as a result, came up with mediocre returns.

The Best Picture of the year was decidedly All The King’s Men – a scarring indictment of politics corrupting a proud man. Long denied the Oscar for her body of work, Olivia deHavilland took home the award for her brutally cold performance in The Heiress – all about a wallflower whose father’s meddling ruins her only chance at happiness. James Cagney reemerged in the gangster genre that had made him famous a decade earlier, in a perverse tale of betrayal and deception – White Heat.

Suffering from the ravages of a life filled with carousing, no amount of makeup could mask the wear and tear on Errol Flynn as he meandered through his final success, The Adventures of Don Juan. The Disney stable marked a return to excellence with Cinderella – a magical retelling of the fairytale through the use of pop songs and the stunning art of animation. MGM – known for their impeccable roster of musical comedy stars launched Mario Lanza in a remarkable film debut, That Midnight Kiss; an unremarkable film costarring Kathryn Grayson. MGM also reunited Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers for The Barkleys of Broadway – a film that unequivocally proved that the good old days for this team were decidedly a thing of the past. Judy Garland and Van Johnson costarred in a remake of The Shop Around the Corner (renamed In The Good Ol’ Summertime). Esther Williams and Red Skelton tried to recapture the magic of Bathing Beauty with Neptune’s Daughter – a dismal waterlogged flick whose only distinction is that it features the Oscar-winning song ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside.’ MGM had more financial success with its remake of Little Women – this time costarring June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor and Peter Lawford. The film proved to be C. Aubrey Smith’s last. The much beloved character actor died of pneumonia later that year.

Death also robbed the artistic community of directors Victor Fleming and Sam Wood, as well as acting greats Richard Dix and Wallace Beery. Writer/director Joseph L. Mankewicz would emerge triumphant the following year with two Oscars for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives – already playing in theaters. Fox’s other notable entry of 1949, Come to the Stable proved an enchanting and lighthearted fable costarring Celeste Holm and Loretta Young.

In retrospect, it seems unlikely that any of the studio moguls could foresee how much of an impact television was to have on their entertainment empire in the next decade. Although first experimented with at the New York World’s Fair just prior to the outbreak of WWII, television remained a quiet footnote throughout the 1940s. T.V. was, however, to shortly be transformed through cash investment and the rise of baby boomer/suburbian migration away from the major cities, into the movies greatest arch nemesis. For all intensive purposes then, the 1940s were the last decade in which the movies dominated American culture as the supreme form of mass entertainment.

@2006 (all rights reserved).

ANASTASIA (1956)

The Vanishing History of a Fairytale Princess

by Nick Zegarac

The rumor, the legend and the mystery of Anastasia has very little to do with her perishable truth, perhaps because historians remain divided as to what actually became of the grand duchess after one bloody night in 1917. Since then, Anastasia has been immortalized as a Broadway smash, an Oscar-winning film, and, a musical cartoon; all cardboard cut out variations on the fairytale princess model: an irony that has all but eclipsed the sad unromantic, and as yet, unsolved imperial puzzle. If any fabled correlation can be drawn from the story of Anastasia, it is as the antithesis of a fairytale - the epitome of a tragic and brutal nightmare, so heinous and haunting that the immensity of its atrocity continues to stagger the heart and confound the mind to this day.

In re-conceptualizing Anastasia’s life as high art, director Anatole Litvak’s 1956 melodrama eschewed fact in favor of total fabrication, modeled on the Cinderella-like transformation from cast off waif to classy aristocrat. It is this rich tapestry cinematically woven by Litvak and spun from the romanticized yarns penned by Arthur Laurents that continue to generate much of the grand duchess’s timeless mythology. In the film, Anastasia the princess, who may or may not have died in vane along with the rest of her family during the slaughter in 1917, is no longer her own person. She has become the star turn, a slate of artistic ambiguity upon which artisans and a Hollywood icon, Ingrid Bergman have inscribed the tale we, as an audience, would rather believe.

It was this fervent desire to daydream beyond what little is actually known about those final moments in a young life that was well in tune with Litvak’s own Russian Jewish heritage. A man of impeccable manners, graciousness and meticulous attention to detail, Litvak had been a premiere director at Germany’s UFA Studios prior to the rise of Adolph Hitler. His 1936 film, Mayerling (shot in France) brought him to the attention of Hollywood.

While in France, Litvak had been privy to that longing for a return of the royal family by some of the exiled Russian aristocrats living out their glorious golden days in the squalor of remnant enclaves within Berlin and Paris. So desperate were these refugees for a return to their homeland – and reinstatement of their titles and lands – that they eagerly embraced a litany of would-be princesses; pretenders to the throne masquerading for their own share of a rumored inheritance hidden in the Bank of England during those formative years immediately following the revolution.

The real Anastasia Nikolayevna (above) was born to a life of wealth and privilege on June 18th, 1901. She was the youngest daughter of the first (and last) 20th century king of Russia; Czar Nicholas Romanov II (below) and his wife Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna. A bit of a tomboy and something of a prankster, Anastasia’s sublime world of culture and wealth was spent being educated in languages and the arts, and, indulging in lavish vacations both at home and abroad; but it was a fragile existence that was not to last.

Despite being a formidable intellectual with an extensive military background, the Czar was both something of a recluse and an autocrat. This distance from his people – who regarded their Czar as a ruler ordained by God - helped to perpetuate the mystique of the monarchy which, at the start of Nicholas’s reign, had enjoyed an unprecedented popularity.

Indeed, the Romanovs were celebrating 300 years of their family bloodline on the throne. However, at a time when other countries (most notable, Britain) were adopting constitutional monarchies, the Czar continued to rule Russia with an iron fist and, some would argue, obliviousness to the suffrage and poverty of more than eighty percent of the populace over which he held dominion.

In 1914, Nicholas declared war on Germany – a move that proved his undoing. For although the Czar placed his country’s pride and welfare at the forefront of foreign affairs, he was ill equipped as either a visionary military man or diplomatist to see his plans through. Assuming command of the armed forces, Nicholas and his army endured one defeat after the next against the Germans.

At home, the Czarina’s growing dependency on a monk of spurious reputation, Grigory Rasputin had begun to erode the royal family’s popularity with the masses. Indeed, Rasputin proved to be a self-indulgent womanizer and a drunk. However, he also seemed to be in possession of some strange mystical power that quelled the hemophilia plaguing the future heir to the throne, Alexei Nikolaievich.

Little is known about the grand duchess Anastasia during this time, except that at the age of twelve she had already become something of a gifted photographer, indulging her craft in family snapshots before becoming a war nurse and tending to the wounded along with the rest of her sisters.

The Bolshevik party headed by Vladimir Lenin seized power and forced the abdication of the Czar. Exiled to the remote Siberian town of Ekaterinburg and “the house of special purpose” (a euphemism for the place of execution), the Czar and ten others were exterminated in a hale of gunfire on the 16th of July 1918. To discourage any royalists from recovering their remains (as religious artifacts) the bodies were bayoneted, stripped naked, doused in gasoline and sulfuric acid and lit afire before being buried in unmarked graves somewhere in the forest beyond the “house of special purpose.”

But were they really dead?

Newspaper reports of the day ran the gamut of wild speculation; from everyone surviving and being exiled in the Far East, to total annihilation. In retrospect, it seems that neither journalistic claim was true.

Although an extensive excavation recovered bones from the earth in 1991, the dig only served to highlight a mystery which had been ongoing almost from the moment of assassination: that Anastasia had maybe survived.

Indeed, while forensic experts were able to piece together nine bodies buried beyond the “house,” neither Anastasia nor Alexei were among the remains. It seems highly unlikely that in the moments of haste immediately following the execution that any special attention would have been placed on relocating the two youngest victims to an alternative burial site. Hence, the speculation and the hope of all royalists from that time onward has long since been that both children escaped their preordained fates.

As early as 1920, pretenders to the throne had begun popping up all over Europe. One struck an indelible impression: Anna Anderson(right). Tuberculosis stricken, Anderson’s checkered past included several suicide attempts and frequent institutionalizations for various mental disorders.

It was during her stay at one of these asylums in France that Anna confided to a fellow patient that she was the daughter of Czar Nicholas II. So compelling was Anderson’s ability to recall specifics (arguably, that no one else other than the real Anastasia could have possibly known) that many in the Russian émigré communities peppered throughout the rest of Europe believed Anna’s story and began launching law suits on her behalf to reclaim her title as grand duchess.

Indeed, it was Anderson’s life thus far that became the fodder for skilled Parisian playwright, Marcelle Maurette’s intercontinental smash play, transcribed for the Broadway stage by scenarist Guy Bolton. Since no one knew the whereabouts of the real grand duchess it became quite feasible to assume that Anderson was the real McCoy. However, in translating the play into a film, screen writer Arthur Laurents made several key changes to the narrative that – although entirely void of historical fact – generated great melodrama for the big screen. These changes included a pivotal confrontation and reconciliation between Anna and her grandmother, the Dowager Empress Marie. In reality, although the real Anastasia’s aunt Olga did travel to France to visit Anna Anderson while she recovered from tuberculosis, no such public approval or acceptance of Anna – either by Olga or the Dowager Empress ever transpired. In fact, the Empress and Anna never met in real life.

ANASTASIA (1956)

"History for Art's Sake"

by Nick Zegarac

Blacklisted by HUAC during the Red Scare in Hollywood, Arthur Laurents (right) and Anastasia’s director, Anatole Litvak had shared a collaborative effort on The Snake Pit in 1948; a film whose premise was psychiatry. So Laurents came to Anastasia’s pedigree well versed in mental disease. However, after an initial meeting with Litvak in Paris, Laurents concurred that the story would function best cinematically as a fairytale.

To some extent, Laurents’ claim that all of history is merely an opinion written from a skewed perspective holds validity. “I did no (historical) research” Laurents would later confess, “…and never felt I was betraying history.” Hence, the screen’s Anastasia would not be quite as haunted or disturbed as her ‘real life’ incarnation.

As originally scripted by Laurents, the film was to have opened with the grand duchess wandering alone at night along the banks of the Seine river. In a state of depression, the woman who thinks she is Anastasia suddenly believes she hears the tinkering of a piano playing a tune from her youth. She is overcome with emotion and falls into the river, only to be rescued by passer’s by.


Litvak, however, had another idea. He wanted to open the film during Russian Easter at the Orthodox Church in Paris. Unfortunately, the church would not give its permission to film, forcing Litvak to actually build a mock up of the church on the backlot in Britain to film his grand introduction.

Casting the film version of Anastasia proved an interesting initial setback, since both Litvak and Laurents wanted Ingrid Bergman for their lead. In Hollywood, and indeed America, Bergman had been labeled persona non grata for over a decade, following her very public split from husband Peter Lindstrom and daughter Pia. Despite the fact that Bergman did not abandon her daughter (as has long since been rumored), the actress who only a decade earlier had been hailed as one of the greatest artisans in the cinema firmament had since been thrown out of the country after her affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Pilloried from the pulpit and denounced in the tabloids as an unfit mother, the United States Senate took the cause of morality to new heights by banning Bergman from returning to the country as they had previously done with Charlie Chaplin.

At 20th Century Fox, then President Spyros P. Skouras urged Litvak to reconsider Bergman as his star. Barring acceptance of anyone else in the role, Skouras next suggested to Bergman that she return on a goodwill tour of the United States by visiting women’s clubs to test her in the court of popular opinion and reaction. To her credit, Bergman refused to be publicly paraded as a wanton outcast, saying, “I’m an actress…as for coming to the United States…I will come when I want to and not to be tested.”

To help bolster Bergman’s reputation, at least in the minds of Fox executives, Litvak cast First Lady of the American Theater, Helen Hayes, in the pivotal role of the Dowager Empress. Hayes had been a respected actress on Broadway before coming to Hollywood in the 1930s and winning an Oscar for her performance in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). However, shortly thereafter her film career had hit a snag with Louis B. Mayer that eventually resulted in her returning to the stage, which had always been her first love.

Helen Hayes had long admired Ingrid Bergman as an actress and befriended her in 1949. During this tenure, she had also married playwright and wit Charles MacArthur. The moniker, ‘first lady of the American Theater’ had been bestowed upon her in 1955 during a Broadway tribute. Reportedly, the modest actress was quite embarrassed to be thought of in such high esteem (especially since she considered contemporaries such as Katharine Cornell to be her superiors). Nevertheless, Hayes graciously accepted the honor, never believing that the title would endure. Ironically, it has.

Accolades aside, Helen Hayes had almost become a recluse by 1956. The tragedy of her only daughter’s death the previous year, coupled with the sudden loss of her husband had left her emotionally drained at the time Litvak proposed her triumphant return to motion pictures. Despite her personal apprehensions in accepting the part, Hayes was immediately welcomed into the fold on the set. She would later recall that the professional courtesies and personal acquaintances developed while working on Anastasia made for one of the most satisfying experiences she had ever had as a film actress.

The final bit of unresolved casting for the film also proved to be the least difficult to decide upon. Everyone wanted Yul Brynner. The exotic leading man, famed for his bald pate, was in the middle of a stellar year of personal artistic accomplishments when Litvak contacted him for Anastasia. 1956 would prove to be Brynner’s seminal year as an actor. He was cast in three of the filmdom’s most spectacular and showy productions; as the Pharoh Ramsey in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; a film reprise of his most celebrated Broadway triumph – as the king of Siam in The King & I, and as General Sergei Pavlovich Bounine in Anastasia. Though he was Oscar nominated for his role in Anastasia, Brynner lost to himself – taking home the Best Actor statuette for The King & I instead.

A delightfully rakish raconteur, Brynner shrouded much of his life in personal mysteries and myth. In truth he was born in Vladivostok on 7 July 1915, and named Yul after his grandfather. Abandoned by his own father, Brynner was a drop out at the age of 19. He became a Paris musician among the Russian gypsies, apprenticed for Jean Cocteau at the Theatre des Mathurins and doubled as a trapeze artist with Cirque d'Hiver. All of this background would serve him well as an aspiring actor during the next few years. In 1941, Brynner studied with Chekhov in the U.S. and debuted on Broadway as a Chinese peasant opposite Mary Martin in Lute Song. It was Martin who recommended Brynner to scenarists Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. The rest…as they say, is history.

The primary appeal of Anastasia, at least for screen writer Arthur Laurents, had always been its Pygmalion aspect – the hewing of a diamond in the rough who proves to be more genuine a gem than even her Svengali had initially hoped for. To be sure, the chemistry between Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman was instantly palpable. In fact, during rehearsals, Brynner had developed a flirtatious crush on his Swedish costar; an assignation quickly dismantled when Bergman turned to Arthur Laurents during their run-through of the script and coolly inquired, “He’s supposed to be royalty?” Despite this initial rebuke, the two costars got on famously throughout the shoot.

To add an air of authenticity to the production, a second film unit was sent to Copenhagen, London and Paris to photograph establishing shots that would be inserted into the final film. For all intensive purposes, however, principle cast and crew never left the sound stages, though at one point both Brynner and Berman were featured sitting inside an authentic 1920s railway car in Britain (with rear projection substituting as a moving backdrop) to depict their journey from France to Denmark.)

For the final moment in the film, in which the Dowager prods the woman she believes to be her granddaughter into following her own heart right into the arms of Gen. Bounine, Arthur Laurents had wanted Helen Hayes (when asked what she shall say to the crowd of spectators awaiting confirmation of Anastasia’s royal acceptance) to look directly into the camera and address the audience with, “I will say, the play is over. Go home.” Though the line is retained in the film’s final cut, Litvak chose instead to have Hayes speak it to her escort, Prince Paul. The conventional finale rather disappointed Laurents, who thought that his version more fittingly capped off his concept of the film; that it was a story not to be taken seriously as fact.

Upon its premiere, Anastasia (1956) was an immediate blockbuster. It marked the celebrated return of Ingrid Bergman to the big screen and earned the actress her second Best Actress Academy Award. The film also cemented Yul Brynner’s popularity at the box office. Though members of the Russian aristocracy were befuddled (and in some cases, outraged) by the artistic liberties taken, most concurred with the assessment that, as a work of pure fiction, the film held up remarkably well under narrative scrutiny.

If the film had any negative publicity, it derived from resurgence in public interest for Anna Anderson (right) – the woman who had retreated from public life to a cottage deep in Germany’s Black Forest. Endlessly besought by reporters hungry for a sound byte, Anna eventually fled her home to the United States in 1968. It was her second trip abroad.

In the late 1920s, Anderson had been the guest of Princess Xenia in Manhattan – a short lived association that ended when Anna stripped naked and danced about the roof top of Xenia’s fashionable penthouse apartment. Institutionalized once more and shipped back to Germany in 1940, Anderson had been content to live her life in private until her return visit to the U.S.

In 1968, Anderson met and married a Charlottesville Virginia university professor. But her personal demons refused to perish. Living in squalor and plagued by her chronic bouts of depression, Anderson was eventually institutionalized once more in 1983. She died on February 12, 1984. Through advanced DNA sampling, taken before her death and matched with a sample from England’s Prince Philip, scientists conclusively determined that the woman who had so cleverly defied any finite labeling of her own identity while she lived was actually NOT the grand duchess Anastasia.

And so at the end of a journey, that began with one of the most tragic disappearing acts in all of 20th century history the whereabouts of the real Anastasia (and that of her brother) are still unknown. Film fantasies aside, as time wears on, Anastasia will probably remain an enigma for the ages.

Did she survive? It’s the rumor…the legend…and the mystery.

@ 2006 (all rights reserved).