OVP: Anastasia (1956)

Film: Anastasia (1956)
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Yul Brynner, Helen Hayes, Akim Tamiroff
Director: Anatole Litvak
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman*, Score)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As y'all know, I've been doing a bit of cleaning out of my DVR in recent weeks, and I decided on Thursday & Friday evenings that I was in the mood to both clean out the DVR and to watch something familiar to me, so I watched a trio of movies that we'll get to this week that are going to get the rare "Not So" in front of the Snap Judgment Ranking.  This is normally reserved for when I decide to re-watch a movie and put my thoughts for posterity on this blog, and more often it's for movies I've seen a dozen times.  This isn't the case for the films this week.  While I have seen Anastasia, I haven't seen it more than once, and it's been maybe 20 years since I last watched the picture, so while certain scenes of it are firmly in my memory, there are other sequences where I completely had forgotten they'd even existed.  Eventually we'll get to the 1956 OVP, and the main reason I wanted to re-watch this is the odd juxtaposition of my love for Ingrid Bergman (one of my all-time favorite actresses) and the fact that so many of her Oscar-winning roles are "meh" in my memory.  Anastasia was her second trophy, and one that came after a huge hibernation period (where, arguably, she had her most creative acting starring in five films with her then-husband Roberto Rossellini).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a highly fictionalized look at the life of Anna Anderson (here called Anna Koreff, but it's impossible to not see this clearly being about Anderson herself).  Anna (Bergman) is a woman who has been in-and-out of mental hospitals, and remembers little about her childhood.  She bares something of a resemblance to what the Grand Duchess Anastasia might have looked like in adulthood, and General Bounine (Brynner) smells an opportunity.  Along with his associate Boris (Tamiroff), they set about to train Anna to become the Grand Duchess, grilling her with facts, but as they continue they start to question if, in fact, she is the Grand Duchess, as she continues to know things that make them question whether or not she's real.  In the end, Anna never truly proves herself to be who she claims she is, but she convinces the Dowager Empress (Hayes), the Grand Duchess's grandmother, that she is her granddaughter, only to then leave her behind, realizing that she's in love with Bounine, and the two run off together, the Dowager Empress content in the knowledge that at least one member of her family is still alive, and now happy.

There's a weird sort of conundrum here.  The mystery of what happened to the Romanovs, and if in fact the youngest princess did escape and survive the Revolution, was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century, something we assumed would never be conclusively proven.  This was certainly the case the first time that I saw this movie in the mid-90's.  However, in 2007, DNA testing was done that proved conclusively that the Czar, his wife, and their five children had all died (they found the body of what was assumed to be Anastasia and her brother Alexei, the final missing two, though it's possible that the other body was of Anastasia's sister Maria) were found and proved that this mystery had a rather sad, humdrum ending; there was not, in fact, a little girl out there who was actually a princess & didn't know it, but instead that little girl died during the Russian Revolution.

In some ways this diminishes this film and some of its grandeur.  We know that Anna Anderson wasn't Anastasia, and while you can suspend belief in the film, it takes something away from Bergman's work if you try to keep this grounded in historical accuracy at all.  The performance isn't great-my memory was correct.  She's fine, and regal, and looks great in a dress, and the one scene between she and Hayes where she has to convinced the Grand Duchess that she could in fact be her granddaughter is the best in the movie (random aside, but it's weird that Bergman won here when Hayes, who is better in the movie, didn't even get nominated considering she was staging something of a comeback at the time on the big screen).  But there's not enough beneath the eyes of this character-there's no sense of what Anna actually believes, which feels off to me.  The score, the only other nomination (again-where were the Costume nominations for this movie?!?) is much better, and thankfully doesn't just rely upon Russian cliches to fill out the music.