Anastasia (20th Century-Fox) is a name, derived from the Greek, that means "of the resurrection." It is also the curiously appropriate name of the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, last of the Czars of Russia. Many romantics fondly believe that Anastasia survived the slaughter of the royal family in a Siberian cellar in 1918, escaped with two members of the firing squad, and is living today, an indigent widow, near Stuttgart, West Germany. On Broadway, Anastasia was a financially successful attempt, made in 1954, to resurrect this legend in the dubious form of a Cinderella story, with undertones of the old amnesia plot. The play has now become a film vehicle for the resurrection of Ingrid Bergman as a major attraction at the box office. Moviegoers are likely to find the charm of these accumulated resurrections more than slightly wormy.
As Anastasia, Actress Bergman is a princess in distress. Nobody believes she is who she says she is, and even she herself, benumbed by the horrors of the revolution and her escape, is inclined to doubt her identity. The doubt is soon complicated by the fact that she is induced to impersonate herself by the wicked General Bounine, a White Russian adventurer who would like to lay hands on the "Czar's fortune" deposited in the Bank of England. The spectator is thus caught in a dramatic paradox (virtue can triumph only if vice does) that keeps his mind engaged long after his emotions have stopped caring what happens to all the impecunious nobility.
The actors, in general, make good use of their melodramatic opportunities. Yul Brynner is gloweringly glamorous as the villain. Helen Hayes is effective as the Empress, but her work, like much about this picture, has been scanted by the inept direction of Anatole Litvak. Director Litvak made his worst mistake in connection with Ingrid Bergman. Her acting is competent, but only now and then toward the end of the picture, almost as if by accident, can the moviegoer see what he probably will want most of all to see on the screen: the fact that, seven years after her abdication as a movie queen, Actress Bergman is still remarkably lovely to look at.
The Sharkfighters (Samuel Goldwyn Jr.; United Artists). "Sharks," says Lieut. Commander Victor Mature with some petulance as this picture begins, "got lousy table manners." It seems that some unmannerly man-eaters dined on the commander's crew when their destroyer sank in the early days of World War II, and now Mature is grimly determined to make every carchariid in creation pay the reckoning. Assigned to accelerate research on shark repellents. Mature moves in on a sluggish school of scientists like a shovelnose on shrimp. Everything from poison to ultrasonics has been tried, but only copper acetate and octopus juice seem to have much effect on the brutes. However, neither of these is strong enough. What to do?