evanston_dad Kapo is a word for Nazi concentration camp inmates who were deputized to keep an eye on their fellow prisoners and report back to the officers. In exchange, they received special treatment and favors.In this 1960 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Susan Strasberg gives a fierce performance as a Kapo in one such camp. We watch her evolve from terrified young girl into ruthless authority figure out of a desperate sense of survival. We then see her undergo a crisis of conscience as the inmates plan an escape. Does she help them or report them?In the story of this one young woman is a broader examination of what drove millions of Germans to either support the Nazis or turn a blind eye to their atrocities. It's a cautionary tale about how far the extinct for survival will push one human being to disregard the life of another. Gillo Pontecorvo, who would direct one of the best films of the 1960s a few years later ("The Battle of Algiers"), allows a bit more sentiment and melodrama to drive this story than he does that later picture, but it's still a bracing and haunting film. For the record, this is the first time I saw Emanuelle Riva as a much younger actress (or at least the first time when I knew who she was), and she's stunning.Grade: A

dbdumonteil Although it features two French leads (Laurent Terzieff and Emmanuelle Riva) ,"Kapo" has disappeared from the French dictionaries of films whereas lots of duds are included.With the exceptions of "Nuit et Brouillard" (which was an exceptional documentary ) and Wanda Jakubowska 's "ostatni etap' (1947) there were few movies which at the time broached the concentration camps subject(the last scenes of Dmytryk's "young lions" ,1958)Susan Strasberg was impressive ,mainly in the first hour though the evolution of her character is not always believable.Besides,her relationship with Sascha weakens the plot .Emmanuelle Riva almost outshines Strasberg,maybe because she was a more experimented actress (she was featured in Resnais's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" ) and her scene when she is translating the German words in a voice chocked with emotion may be the strongest in the whole movie.The "potato" scene is also revealing.I remember what Simone Veil ,a former French minister (secretary) (and herself a former prisoner in a concentration camp),said after watching the last episode of "Holocaust " (the seventies miniseries) : "in the camps ,people were not as helpful ,as kind ,as compassionate as they are in the film" ."Kapo" shows a very harsh world where the women are almost always fighting against their mates:that's the story of Edith /Nicole .When it was released ,the movie was trashed by Jacques Rivette because of a tracking after Riva 's death ;at the time Nouvelle vague= intellectual dictatorship.Although defended by the Italian masters (including Visconti),the movie was cursed .The IMDb users have restored it to favor.

tarmcgator The first third of "Kapo" is powerful and affecting. The rest, despite the surface realism, borders on the ludicrous.I doubt that any filmmaker can create a fictional movie that thoroughly encompasses the Holocaust, because it was experienced by such a diverse group of people. In "Kapo," director Gillo Pontecorvo tries earnestly to tell the story of a French teenager who, separated from her Jewish parents, determines that she will survive no matter what. Edith (Susan Strasberg) assumes the guise of "Nicole," a non-Jewish political prisoner who escapes the gas chamber and finds refuge in a group of other female prisoners assigned to a labor camp, where the Nazis essentially work the inmates to death rather than exterminate them outright.Surviving the labor camp ultimately means becoming a ruthless stooge of the Nazis, and Edith/Nicole's descent into inhumanity is believable, up to a point. She becomes a thief, then a whore for the SS guards, and finally a brutal "Kapo," a privileged prisoner who supervises the other inmates. However, the transition accelerates to a point that the viewer is left wondering just how quickly it is occurring, and just how Edith/Nicole can shed her last shreds of sympathy and compassion for the other prisoners. She enters into a odd friendship with one of the German SS guards (Gianni Garko), but that interesting development is pursued only a little.Instead, a hunky Russian soldier, Sascha (Laurent Terzieff), arrives with a POW work detail, and, after almost getting him killed by the Germans, "Nicole" falls in love with him -- and "Kapo" starts to tread into Hollywood (or Cinecitta) silliness. (Falling in love with a soldier of the Red Army, rather than with an SS man, would have much more politically correct in 1959 Italy). Nicole's reverse transition from the amoral Kapo to a smitten adolescent, and the love scenes between Strasberg and Terzieff, are simply not believable in the context of what is seen earlier in the film. I suppose the filmmakers would argue that the love affair between "Nicole" and the Russian soldier was necessary to set up the final plot sequence: as the victorious Red Army approaches their camp, the female prisoners and Russian POWs plot a mass escape to forestall their massacre by the fleeing German guards. The denouement of "Kapo" is, perhaps, visually realistic, but it doesn't really mesh with the story of Edith/Nicole that emerges in the early part of the film.That first 25 or 30 minutes of "Kapo" are powerful and wrenching, as Edith is torn away (seemingly with no warning) from what appears to have been a relatively comfortable, middle-class existence in Paris (as comfortable as it could have been for French Jews in 1942-43) and transported to what we quickly recognize as Auschwitz. In a matter of minutes, Edith is plunged into near-surreal terror and then stripped of her old identity in order to survive as "Nicole." It is a sequence that promises much, which is why I found the rest of the film such a disappointment.I will not profess expert knowledge of the Holocaust, and perhaps the story told in "Kapo" could have happened. Pontecorvo and co-writer Franco Solinas did extensive research, and "Kapo" certainly has visual authenticity compared with various documentaries I've seen on the subject. Strasberg is effective in her role as Edith/Nicole; the other actors are credible given the roles they have to occupy. There is a noticeable problem with language; the film is in Italian, which the various nationalities represented among the camp inmates all seem to speak fluently and interchangeably; but a key scene involves an inmate translating the camp commandant's speech from German into -- Italian? How many Italian speakers would have been in such a camp? "Kapo," however, ultimately founders on the unbelievable relationship between "Nicole" and Sascha that dominates the second half. I just couldn't buy it.

John Seal Only the survivors of the Holocaust can tell us what the concentration camp experience was really like, but Kapo is probably as close as cinema can get to recreating the numbing horrors of the camps--and that includes Schindler's List. Susan Strasberg is superb as Edith, the Jewish teenager who is saved by chance and then becomes a collaborator in order to survive. The film's greatest strength is its ability to make us comprehend the forces that compelled inmates to become kapos--the Nazi equivalent of prison trustees--and almost (but not quite) makes us sympathize with them. Snatched from the jaws of the gas chamber only to have the power of life and death thrust upon them, the kapos did what they had to do in order to survive--and who amongst us would not take that same chance if thrust into the heart of Nazi darkness. This incredibly powerful film is filled with astonishing imagery, none more powerful than the scene of Edith/Nicole watching helplessly as her parents are forced to jog to their demise amidst a crowd of children and elderly inmates--people who are inessential to the Reich's war machine. This important film, long forgotten in the United States, has now been unearthed by Turner Classic Movies, and hopefully a DVD is not far behind.