Anastasia

This is a great movie with fabulous performances by Brynner, Bergman, and Hayes. My one complaint is not about the movie, but the videotape. Litvak made a beautiful movie and used every inch of the screen. There are multiple scenes where the three principals are located left, right, and center. With pan-and-scan you can never see more than two of them at a time. This movie deserves to be re-released in its original aspect; better yet, release it on DVD. But go ahead and see it; you will be moved by the story.

Bergman is charming as an amnesiac young woman who is recruited by Brynner to impersonate the daughter of the late czar. Bergman won her second Oscar for her portrayal. Brynner is good as the exiled Russian who tries to bring her back into a world she once may have known and Hayes is stand out as the grand dutchess who strives to find the truth behind this girls' credentials. Crisp direction from Anatole Litvak and a lively supporting cast of Akim Tamiroff make this a simply ravishing film.

A trio of unscrupulous Russian exiles Yul Brynner, Sacha Pitoeff, and Akim Tamiroff locate an amnesia victim among the flotsam and jetsam of refugees in post World War I Europe and attempt to pass her off as one of Czar Nicholas II,'s daughters, Grand Duchess Anastasia, who survived the massacre of the royal family in 1918.

The role of "Anastasia" marked Ingrid Bergman's return to an American film production after her exile from America after 1949 and she won her second Oscar with it. She runs a whole gamut of emotions from absolute despair to an assumed air of royalty. After a while Brynner and his confederates think that just maybe Ingrid's the real deal.

Of course the ultimate test is whether the Dowager Empress of Russia, Helen Hayes, accepts Ingrid as the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Although Ingrid got her Oscar, I've always felt that Hayes gives the best performance in the film.

At the age Dowager Empress Marie was in the Twenties all she had left was memories. She's from the Danish Royal House and was the widow of Alexander III and the mother of Nicholas II of Russia. Her world was turned upside down in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, not just toppled from the privileged position she had, she lost her entire family of the next generation of Romanovs to political upheaval. Hayes is back in her native Denmark, a lonely proud, but regal woman with nothing but memories. She truly becomes the Empress Marie.

Yul Brynner as General Sergei Pavlovich Bounine is one of that crowd of Russian refugees who apparently got out of Russia with more than just a skin. He's the owner of a Russian café in Paris and should be doing OK, but he's got a streak of larceny in him and a taste for high living. He's involved in bilking a whole lot of Russian exiles in a search for a Romanov heir to claim millions deposited by the late Czar for his children in the Bank of England. He's got to come up with an heir of some kind and fast. But he's a charming fellow and gives one charming performance.

Both Brynner and Director Anatole Litvak with their own Slavic backgrounds give Anastasia a real flavor of authenticity for the main characters and the Russian exile background of the film. It was shot on location in both Paris and Copenhagen and the camera work is first rate.

Anastasia became a milestone film for Ingrid Bergman and while Anna Koreff may have been a bogus Russian princess, as an actress Ingrid Bergman was always the real deal.

This is a film that should be re-released. I mean at the motion picture theaters besides video and DVD. Nothing changed. Ingrid Bergman, Helen Hayes and Yul Brynner do superlative acting performances and the direction, music and the cinematography just could not be duplicated, in my opinion.

Other films have been redone with contemporary actors, some successful and some not so.

It would be very difficult to improve on this one. I have seen this film a few times over the past forty years and I appreciate it more and more.

Wish we could have more quality cinema like it!

What a wonderful movie!!!! They simply don't make them like this anymore. Start with the most mundane matters, the production values. The glorious wide screen aspect ratio is a delight, as is the wonderful Technicolor process, which gives us a vividness that is sorely lacking from movies nowadays. The great Alfred Newman wrote the score. Then consider the acting - first rate on all fronts. Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergmann play beautifully off each other, and Akim Tamiroff shines in the type of role he excelled in, the sweaty, seedy, slightly comic con artist. Martita Hunt is wonderful as the slightly loony lady in waiting. Helen Hayes is off the charts as the Dowager Empress, in what was evidently a comeback role for her. To watch her display her ambivalent emotions as she deals with what could be her long-lost granddaughter are a revelation. Her wordless final embrace with Anna is a ten second master class in the heights to which great acting can rise through facial expression alone. Finally, the script; it impishly refuses to engage the central question - was Anna Anderson really Anastasia, or an impostor? (FYI, she was an impostor.) By the end, the question doesn't seem to matter, so beautifully has the script dealt with things like lost hopes, wishful thinking, doubt, deceit, treachery, nostalgia for a lost world, romance, and amnesia. Don't miss this great story, beautifully told in a lavish production.