KAPO (1960)

During the Nazi occupation of Paris, Edith, a Jewish teenager, is walking home from a piano lesson when she sees her parents being rounded up by the authorities. A neighbor warns her to be silent, but she runs after them and is taken with them to a concentration camp. Separated from her parents, she is told that children and old people are the first to be killed, so she escapes from her holding room and is helped by a sympathetic doctor. He gives her the clothing and identity of a young woman named Nicole who has just died—he takes the girl's jacket off the corpse and gives it directly to Edith to put on. Nicole was a criminal and her jacket bears a black triangle which gives Edith a slight advantage over having the yellow star of the Jewish prisoners, and when she sees her parents as they are marched off to the gas chambers, she vows to survive; as the doctor says to her, "Live…and think of nothing else." Over time, she becomes a hardened survivor: first she becomes a prostitute for the SS men, and then rises in their esteem enough to be named "kapo," a camp inmate who is given official duties keeping the other inmates in line, even as she begins to lose the respect of the prisoners. She has a friendly relationship with an officer named Karl, but when a batch of Russian soldiers is brought to the camp, she falls in love with Sascha, their leader, and is slowly brought into the Russians' plan to stage an escape, with tragic consequences.

This was perhaps the first fiction film to deal with life in a concentration camp and may have seemed grim and realistic to audiences of the era, but now it feels melodramatic and predictable. It certainly remains watchable, but viewers may need to cut it some slack. Appropriately, it does have a fairly gritty look (in black & white) and camp life isn't exactly prettified; actually, everyday camp life is largely ignored here except for the scenes of the prisoners at hard labor. These women, though grimy and tired, don't look starved or unhealthy, even though the threat of sick inmates being sent off to be killed is mentioned more than once. There are some moments that still retain power, including the hanging of one inmate and the suicide of another, and the climactic escape scene is very effective. The acting all around is fine. Some critics think that Susan Strasberg (who was 22 playing 14, looking much more like 22) gives an affectless performance, but I think that fits a character who comes to disassociate herself from her former life in order to survive at any cost, a strategy that the movie would seem not to endorse. Gianni Garko (pictured with Strasberg) is ridiculously handsome, like a young Robert Redford, as Karl, the humanized Nazi; Laurent Terzieff, almost as handsome, makes a good Sascha. Emmanuelle Riva and Didi Perego are excellent as two of the female inmates with whom Edith bonds, to some degree. As this is an Italian film, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, most of the dialogue is in Italian, not French, despite the nationalities of the inmates. This felt off to me until I remembered that I think nothing of French or Italian character speaking English in a Hollywood film. [TCM]