Kapò

Plot synopsis:
Naive fourteen-year-old Edith (Susan Strasberg) and her Jewish parents are sent to a concentration camp, where the latter are killed. Sofia (Didi Perego), an older, political prisoner, and a kindly camp doctor save her from a similar fate by giving her a new, non-Jewish identity, that of the newly dead Nichole Niepas.
As time goes by, she becomes more hardened to the brutal life. She first sells her body to a German guard in return for food. She becomes fond of another guard, Karl (Gianni Garko). The fraternization helps her become a kapo, one of those put in charge of the other prisoners. She thrives while the idealistic Sofia grows steadily weaker.
When she falls in love with Sascha (Laurent Terzieff), a Russian prisoner of war, Edith is persuaded to play a crucial role in a mass escape, turning off the power. Most of the would-be escapees are killed, but some get away. Edith is not one of them. As she lies dying, she tells Karl, "They screwed us over, Karl, they screwed us both over." She dies saying the traditional prayer Shema Yisrael, to feel again her real identity.

Tags: cult, murder

Review:
This Italian film, following the travails of a young Jewish girl in a Nazi work camp, is successful due mainly to its realistic sets, and the performances of Strasberg and Terzieff.
The whole concept of the "kapo" is new to me, and it added a further dimension to the horrific Nazi experience not covered in films such as "Sophie's Choice" and "The Pianist." Deservedly, it was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film) in 1960.
Certainly, Strasberg must have been considered.A "kapo" was a prisoner of a concentration camp that watched over the other prisoners in a specified group.
Very realistic, almost raw, which was surprising considering that this movie was made in 1959.STRASBERG as 'Nicole' works her way up through a concentration camp to become the woman in charge of her fellow prisoners.
Although not as powerful as other prisoner of war films such as "Seven Beauties" it stands out because of the performances of all the women and especially Susan Strasberg who does a magnificent job starting out as the young innocent girl, hiding the fact that she is Jewish, a bewildering task, and her agonizing evolution into a hardened guard.Don't look for huge sets and gruesome scenes of gas chambers and ovens here.
I've never really liked holocaust flicks because they get well, usually made so that the dumbest of the dumb to 'get it.' Kapo is just a movie that shows, not tells, which of course makes the best story.
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..
There, the 14-years-old girl played by Susan Strasberg finds a harsh reality and changes identities with the help of the camp medic and rises to the position of Kapo.
This excellent movie deals about extermination center, abuse of camp guards or Kapos who enjoy their power, prisoners committing suicide and the subsequent getaway led by Laurent Terzieff and Russian prisoners .
Thus , when the incoming transports ,mostly Jews, SS soldiers made instant decisions,those who were fit to labors were sent into the camp, others including the children ,were dispatched immediately to the gas chambers.Finally the inmates broke out in a desperate riot that I believe it can be the concentration camp of Sorbibor, only in which Russian prisoners achieved to escape .
Victims (as Susan Strasberg and her parents) were brought to the camp in unventilated transports, and all but a handful were gassed after arrival,the gas chambers could accommodate hundred prisoners at one time using Zyclon B which was a crystallized prussic acid which dropped into death chamber ,most of their corpses were burned in open pits (as occurs at the ending of the movie when is opened a large hole to bury unfortunates)..
This film relates the story of a 14-year-old Jewish girl during her captivity in a Nazi concentration camp.
The idea that The Battle of Algiers could be missed for its greatness is hard to imagine!)As Kapò begins, Edith (Susan Strasberg), has just finished her harpsichord lesson and is going home when she sees her parents being arrested by the Nazis.
Since Edith is new to the camp--and another girl her age had just died the night before--the doctor instructs her how to change her identity and be saved from certain death.
The doctor tells Edith that she must cut her hair, change her clothes with those of the dead girl and take on a new identity, as Nicole Niepas, a non-Jewish criminal (with a black triangle on her smock).
By being harsh on the other prisoners and reporting any resistance or planned insubordination to their Germans captures, the kapos are given special privileges such as food, clothing, and use of sanitary facilities.
As with my recent viewing of Bernhard Wicki's THE BRIDGE (1959), I was introduced to the film under review via a still from it adorning the large and lavishly-illustrated "War Movies" tome I used to pore over as a kid; actually, apart from a recent Italian TV screening, I only recall a solitary broadcast of it back then one Friday night – this was also true of Pontecorvo's best-known work, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1965), which I did catch much later on TV and subsequently on the big-screen in London – but, given the adult subject matter, I passed on it.
In a somewhat sensationalistic touch, the protagonist who becomes the titular Nazi lackey is a Jew passed off by the camp medic as a French girl after having witnessed her parents' oblivious march towards the gas chamber.
She is played by American Susan Strasberg: though we are asked to believe that she is a virginal 14 year-old who soon becomes the young officers' favourite 'lay' (among them Gianni Garko), the actress is effective in delineating the character's trajectory from doe-eyed innocent to callous parasite (even if it seems this is primarily done in order to appease her personal hunger) to hopeless romantic (she becomes enamoured of rebellious Russian POW Laurent Terzieff) to resigned martyr (the heroine's elite position in the camp makes her the ideal, albeit endangered, candidate to switch off the electrically-charged barbed-wire fence that would precipitate a mass escape attempt).
Interestingly enough, Strasberg had just been passed over in recreating her Broadway role for George Stevens' screen rendition of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959).As expected, the supporting female cast is carefully chosen so as to encompass a wide variety of types among both victims and collaborationists: most notable, however, are Emmanuelle Riva (as the one who initially takes Strasberg under her wing but is then shunned by the new Kapo' and ends up committing suicide via electrocution) and Didi Perego (a Silver Ribbon award winner for Best Supporting Actress as the statuesque leader of the inmates whose outspokenness eventually leads to her being gunned down in cold blood).
Pontecorvo (whom I saw at the 2004 Venice Film Festival during a screening of the Michelangelo Antonioni/Wong Kar-Wai/Steven Soderbergh-directed anthology EROS and has since passed away) did not have a prolific career, but his place in the annals of World Cinema is assured on the strength of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS alone; incidentally, he is also credited with collaborating on Carlo Rustichelli's brooding score.
With an effectively haunting music score and excellent sound work, the audio side of this film brings the horrors of living in a Holocaust concentration camp - and the changes in values one experiences under harsh conditions - right to the surface.
For the most part, Susan Strasberg is superb as an innocent-looking Jewish girl taken prisoner and forced to change her way of thinking.
It also was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film--which it lost to Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring".When the film begins, teenager Edith has been brought to a Nazi death camp along with her parents and many other Jews.
What's next?Up through Edith/Nicole's transformation into a kapo, I was captivated by the film.
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.
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.
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.
She reminds me of Giancarlo Giannini in that other masterpiece about concentration camp prisoners, Pasqualino Settebellezze.This is a very bleak Holocaust movie because it paints a picture of the inmates that may leave some people uncomfortable.
The camp may seem a bit unrealistic nowadays as well as a love story that develops within its electric fences, but back then the concentration world wasn't as well studied as it is today.
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1960, Gillo Pontecorvo's second film Kapo features Susan Strasberg as a Holocaust victim who decides that she will do anything to survive, even join the enemy.
Kapo, which stands for Kameradenpolizei, refers to death camp collaborators who are recruited from the "criminal element" to supervise other prisoners in return for better treatment and more privileges.
Pontecorvo, who fought in the Italian Resistance as a member of the Communist Party, presents a realistic picture of what life in a concentration camp must have been like but no movie can fully capture the madness and inevitably any attempt to dramatize it must take on aspects of melodrama.Strasberg, who had played the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway several years earlier, portrays Edith, a 14-year old Jewish girl who is sent to a concentration camp with her parents when Jews are rounded up in Paris.
After watching her parents die in the gas chambers along with other women and children, Sofia, a friend, introduces Edith to the camp doctor who provides her with a new identity as the non-Jewish Nicole.
Cutting her hair and dressing her in the work clothes of a prisoner that died that morning, she is sent to a labor camp where she witnesses repeated horrors including the hanging of a young girl for alleged sabotage.Desperate to stay alive, she offers herself to a German soldier Karl (Gianni Garko).
Although little about this relationship is developed, it leads to Nicole accepting the job of a Kapo, and the victim becoming a victimizer, brutally enforcing the camp's harsh rules on her fellow prisoners.
It is only when she witnesses the suicide of a close friend Terese (Emanuelle Riva) and falls in love with Sascha (Laurent Terzieff), a Russian prisoner of war, that she is able to redeem the human values that had once been an integral part of her life.
Much of this happens over a period of time but the passage of time is not shown and Nicole's transformation from a loving young girl to a bullying camp guard seems too quick and facile to be truly convincing, and there is little self-reflection in the process.
The experience gained in this film, however, paved the way for Pontecorvo's masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, only a few years after..
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 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.
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.
Susan Strasberg stars as a young Jewish girl sent to Auschwitz, where she witnesses her parents being dragged to the gas chamber.
Disguised as a Gentile, she is moved to a work camp where her fight for survival leads her to become a prison guard.
Roberto Benigni was hailed as a genius in 1999 for his whimsical and magical film 'Life is beautiful', which was about love surviving all adversities in the harsh playground of a Nazi concentration camp.
I never liked that film, I felt it was a low and cheap way of playing the 'Love can survive any obstacle' schtick that filmmakers push on us viewers to make us feel all warm inside.
Miramax not backing his films anymore?KAPO made in 1959 by the Gillo Pontecorvo, who would later go on to make the brilliant 'Battle of Algiers', does more with his film about love surviving through all adversities than Mr Benigni could ever throw up for his own film about the harsh realities human beings had to do in order to survive.I caught this film just as I was going to sleep late one night and stayed up till the early morning riveted on what would become of 'Nicole', a 14 year old Jewish girl who along with her parents are thrown into a concentration camp during WW2.
The little lost girl learns to adapt and survive in the camp which eventually leads her to become the 'Kapo' in the title.'They lied to us' seems to be the motto of this film, as Nicole learns to trust and look after only herself, until she opens up and discovers there is love once more in her awful life.I will not give too much away about this powerful and totally mesmerizing film, which once again opens up another story of life inside a concentration camp through the eyes of young Jewish girl who grows up quick and becomes a Nazi lackey in the form of a KAPO..
Susan Strasberg, a virgin young girl goes into the bedroom to give herself to a German officer to gain better treatment, comes back out of the bedroom perfectly made up and looking exactly the way she did when she went in...come on!
Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-nominated "Kapò" tells the story of a young Jewish woman sent to a concentration camp where she eventually gets put in charge of other prisoners due to her fraternization with a guard.
This started out to be a very depicting picture of the harshness and horrors of WWII concentration camps but slightly different than the typical movies we see in that era as this focused on a camp with just women until about half way through you see some men POW's mixed in with the women and that is when the beautiful love story begins between Nicole and Sasha.