Event

DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

Tuesday, September 7 at 7:30pm
Tickets: Members $15 / Public $20

George Stevens' life-altering experience of witnessing the death camps after WWII
was doubtless responsible for his desire to adapt the famed diary of the teenaged
Jewish girl, brilliantly played by Millie Perkins. Released around the world between 1959 and
1960, The Diary of Anne Frank was the first significant film to inscribe the devastating impact
of Nazi Germany's persecution and mass murder of Europe's Jews into popular consciousness
years before the term "Holocaust" itself came into common use. Relying on Anne Frank's
uncanny skills as a born writer with a keen understanding of human nature, the film conveys
the real life drama of two families--the Franks and the Van Daanshiding precariously from
the Gestapo for years with the help of Dutch friends, packed together in a secret attic hidden
behind a bookshelf in an Amsterdam factory.
MILLIE PERKINS was already an internationally famous model when director George Stevens cast her in the iconic title role in The
Diary of Anne Frank. Her later performances include Wild in the Country with Elvis Presley, Monte Hellman's classic westerns
starring Jack Nicholson: The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind, the cult classic Wild in the Streets, and Oliver Stone's Wall Street.
Ms. Perkins will be interviewed by Foster Hirsch, author and pioneer in the establishment of academic film criticism.
Program curated by Dr. Jud Newborn, CAC Special Projects Curator and Founding Historian, Museum of Jewish Heritage NY