AFED #53: Anastasia (US, 1957); Dir. Anatole Litvak
In Hollywood the truth is always inconvenient. Facts become mutable, actual persons are delineated into caricatures and around it all is erected the scaffolding of a narrative arc, implying subtexts and relationships which never existed. Take Anastasia ; inspired by the case of Anna Anderson , the mentally ill Polish woman who claimed to be Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II that allegedly escaped death when Bolsheviks murdered the rest of the Russian royal family in 1918. Although the veracity of Anderson's story couldn't be completely dismissed until 2008, when Anastasia's remains were finally discovered, even in 1957 it had unravelled to the point of becoming laughable. But not according to the account given here, in which the amnesiac Anderson (Ingrid Bergman) is discovered by General Bounine (Yul Brynner), a former white Russian officer who has been seeking out a suitable Anastasia in order to get a slice of the £10m deposited by the Romanovs in ...