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Stevens has injected a dozen such hairbreadth episodes into the film, each a little scarier than the last. Yet Diary is no more a mere thriller than Moby Dick is a mere whaling yarn. The movie shines with a fundamental conviction that, even under the most abysmal conditions, man will find a way to pass on what he has learned and to perpetuate himself. "Here we are," cries Anne petulantly, "the whole world falling around our ears, and I don't know what to think." She knows far more than she thinks—devotion to her father, understanding of her skittish mother, joy in her religion, pleasure in her active mind, the mystery of romantic love for young Peter van Daan, "the miracle of what is taking place inside me."
Director Stevens screened more than 10,000 applicants in a search for an unknown capable of combining the bittersweet charm, the alternate flashes of gaiety, melancholy and quick-witted insight that made up Anne Frank. His choice was an 18-year-old model from Fair Lawn, N.J. named Millie Perkins. Gambling against the idea of using an established actress ("I wanted someone who could be identified as Anne Frank, not as a well-known actress playing a role"), Stevens wins handsomely. Newcomer Perkins, who suggests a younger, thinner, more animated Elizabeth Taylor, has an untrained voice that sometimes jars the ear, but more important, she also has a quicksilver face that delights the eye. Lined up with Broadway Veterans Joseph Schildkraut and Gusti Huber (as her father and mother) and Hollywood Pros Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn (as Mrs. van Daan and the fussy bachelor dentist), she maintains Anne's position right where it should be—the dead-center focal point of an artistically brilliant argument for human dignity.