Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapò

Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapò (1960) manages to combine a startling depiction of the dehumanization of the camps with a similarly unsatisfying Communist romance. Susan Strasberg plays Édith, a French-Jewish 14-year-old sent to Auschwitz with her parents. Put in a grange with the other children of the transport to await death the next morning, Édith sneaks back into the barracks where a sympathetic doctor gives her the identity and clothes of a gentile criminal named Nicole who has just died. Édith thus exchanges her yellow star for a black triangle, and generally better prospects. (At dawn "Nicole" watches as the other children, and the older folk, including her parents, are herded naked to the gas chambers.)

Nicole is sent to a work camp in Poland where conditions are marginally better, though she is among the most visibly traumatized of the prisoners. At first it seems that she can't be degraded; when another woman spills her soup, Nicole shares hers. Thérèse (Emmanuelle Riva) sees this and thinks she and Nicole are two "nice girls" united against their common fate. Before long, however, Nicole steals a potato Thérèse got in exchange for a shirt, and then later accepts an offer to become a prostitute for the SS guards who promise her more food. This is one of the events that will lead Thérèse, now the camp's lone nice girl, to throw herself onto the electrified fence. (The filming of Thérèse's suicide in turn led to Jacques Rivette's famous denunciation of the movie, and to Serge Daney's intriguing, if extravagantly "French," work of "cinema-biography" entitled "The Tracking Shot in Kapò".)

As Nicole, Édith becomes so inured to her situation that she lounges in the SS barracks chatting with a maimed officer. She is deadened enough, in fact, that she accepts promotion to Kapò, the prisoner in charge of truncheoning the other women in her barracks into line. You know this isn't a Hollywood movie by the way the teenaged ingénue grabs at the chance to barter sex for food. And with the exception of Riva, the other women in the barracks don't seem like actresses; not only are they believably tough in a way no American actress is, even in working-class roles, but the violence with which the actors playing the SS handle them is shocking.

Strasberg isn't quite right for the role for this very reason — in such a realistically brutal environment she's not scrappy enough to be anyone's choice for Kapò. Unfortunately, however, the soulfulness that made her convincing as a piano-playing teenaged French Jewess makes her right for the turn the story takes at the end, when Russian POWs are brought into the camp and Nicole and Sasha (Laurent Terzieff), a Red Army soldier, fall in love. The movie loses all credibility after Nicole spitefully gets Sasha punished to show him she's in charge. (He's forced to stand through the night facing the fence; if he falls forward he'll be electrocuted, if he steps backward he'll be shot.) Sasha comes through this ordeal without rancor toward Nicole; rather, he loves her, and his heroic strength is enough to revive her humanity. (How many young couples, I wonder, had their first dates in Nazi work camps?)