Word: dussel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...depth for the title role. Despite her poetic prettiness and exaggerated emaciation, she looks like an Ivory Soap ad instead of a tortured adolescent. The other actors do considerbly better; Shelley Winters, as Mrs. Van Daam, dispenses with glamour in favor of convincing frumpishness, while Ed Wynn, as Mr. Dussel, adds a fine touch of ridiculous humanity...
...violently, and the first thing we saw at Auschwitz was the garish light of the searchlights trained on the cars . . . The voice of a loudspeaker dominated all others; it bellowed: 'Women to the left, men to the right!' I saw them go away: Mr. Van Daan, Mr. Dussel, Peter, Mr. Frank." The men never saw the women again. The women were told that trucks were ready to take the small children and the sick to the prison. But those who fought their way into the trucks never reached the camp; they vanished from-the face of the earth...
...such special circumstances, of two families living under one roof. Neither in the sudden moments of midnight terror nor in the explosions of cramped boardinghouse farce is there any prettifying. If Anne's father (beautifully played by Joseph Schildkraut) is disciplined and quiet, her mother can be excitable; Dussel the dentist is fussy, Mr. Van Daan greedy. Under Garson Kanin's skillful direction, there is no more of an attempt at heartbreaking gaiety than at lurid gloom; there is chiefly a day-by-day liveliness, a gradual learning to walk-and on tiptoe-among eggs...
Through the tense months Anne kept firm hold of her sense of humor. When Mrs. van Daan appeared with an injured rib, Anne wrote: "That's what happens to elderly ladies who do such idiotic exercises to reduce their large behinds." When Dentist Dussel went to work on Mrs. van Daan's molars, Anne was gleefully reminded of "a picture from the Middle Ages entitled 'A Quack at Work.' " But she could make fun of herself too: her beloved diary she called "the unbosomings of an ugly duckling...