The performance - which won Bergman the second of her three Academy Awards - is touching at least partly because we're fortunate that it exists: Bergman almost didn't get the role for numerous reasons, but chiefly because she had fallen deeply out of favor with Hollywood, and with audiences, when she embarked on an affair with Roberto Rossellini, for whom she left her husband. The affair began when she went to Italy in 1949 to film Stromboli (1950); not long afterward, she became pregnant with Rossellini's child and decided to remain in Italy with him. The moral gatekeepers not just of Hollywood, but of America, were outraged. She was denounced from the floor of Congress as an "agent of evil." Though she'd become beloved for her roles in pictures like Gaslight (1944, for which she earned her first Oscar), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and Casablanca (1942), it didn't seem possible she could ever again work in the United States.
Anastasia was a hot property to begin with. The story originated as a play, written by Marcelle Maurette and first staged in France in 1951; it was based partially on the story of the real-life Anna Anderson, a woman with a history of mental illness who became the toast of high society by somehow convincing the "right" people that she was indeed the lost Russian princess. Guy Bolton further adapted the play for Broadway, where it became a hit in 1954. Several studios were dying to get their hands on it, and 20th Century Fox won the bidding war, paying some half-million dollars for the property. (The lavish movie, shot on location in Paris, London and Copenhagen, would ultimately cost more than $3 million to produce.) Arthur Laurents worked on the script, and the charismatic Brynner, filming The King and I at the time, signed on to play Bounine. The Ukrainian-born Litvak - the man behind the 1936 French-made hit Mayerling -- would direct. As a young man, Litvak had worked at a theater in St. Petersburg. In 1925, he fled Russia for Berlin, working there until the rise of the Nazi regime; he later moved to France. After the success of Mayerling, Litvak received invitations to work in Hollywood. He became an American citizen and enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he began filming in Europe once again, so Anastasia would be something of a homecoming for him.
But who would play the title character? Fox president Spyros Skouras was pushing for Jennifer Jones. But Litvak and studio head Darryl F. Zanuck desperately wanted Bergman for the role, even though she hadn't made an American picture since Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc, in 1948. Skouras resisted, believing that U.S. exhibitors would be hostile to the fallen star. But Zanuck went to the board of 20th Century Fox, eventually persuading them to take a chance on Bergman -- who, it turns out, was chafing under the constraints of Rossellini's possessiveness and was more than ready to return to Hollywood.
The performance she gave as the just-maybe princess Anastasia is perhaps excessively melodramatic in sections, but at its best, it has a touching fragility. "Miss Bergman's performance as the heroine is nothing short of superb as she traces the progress of a woman from the depths of derangement and despair through a struggle with doubt and delusion to the accomplishment of courage, pride and love," wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times upon the film's release. "It is a beautifully molded performance, worthy of an Academy Award and particularly gratifying in the light of Miss Bergman's long absence from commendable films." There's a note of superiority in that compliment - Crowther had a rather stuffy notion of what made a film "commendable" - but he's right about the performance. Bergman really is royalty here, the kind that doesn't require any special birthright.
By Stephanie Zacharek
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SOURCES: IMDb
Backstory: Anastasia, 2001 TV episode
The New York Times
Richard Corliss, "Top 10 Comeback Movies," Time, December 15, 2008
Producer: Buddy Adler
Director: Anatole Litvak
Screenplay: Arthur Laurents, based on the play by Marcelle Maurette and the Broadway adaptation by Guy Bolton
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard
Music: Alfred Newman
Film Editing: Bert Bates
Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Anastasia), Yul Brynner (Bounine), Helen Hayes (Empress), Akim Tamiroff (Chernov), Martita Hunt (Baroness von Livenbaum)
[color, 105 minutes]
