The movie thus reformulates itself in a drearily familiar heroic register. The Russians are mounting an escape and Nicole plans to go with Sasha to Russia. When she asks him what his parents will think of her — she's told him she's really Jewish, and then there's the SS concubinage and all — he says he'll never breathe a word and that they'll love her. So we are in KZ Hollywood, after all, and it gets worse, when it turns out that Nicole is the only person who can shut off the juice to the fence but when she does so an alarm will sound and she'll inevitably be killed. Sasha has promised the other Russians not to tell her but he breaks down just before zero hour. Nicole is so heartbroken that she wants to die anyway, so what the heck.

Although Pontecorvo left the Communist Party after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, the movie ends up dramatizing a Communist bromide — as a comrade says to Sasha, sometimes it's right for one to die to save many. Yes, but generally that one is a volunteer, and there's certainly no heroism where she isn't. Kapò degenerates into a gross amalgam of trite romance heroics and unconvincing left-wing rhetoric. When the same Russian hears the artillery of the approaching Red Army, he muses, "What will it feel like to be free again, to do whatever we want?" How would a young Russian in the 1940s know what it felt like to be free in the first place? (That's as loony as imagining a cultivated French Jewess finding contentment as a Stalinist war bride.) The leftism merges with the sort of bland popular-front platitudes we know from the likes of Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller, when Sasha says to Nicole, for instance, "Sometimes things happen that we have no control over. We want love and happiness for everyone but we're forced to kill and hate."

Pontecorvo is not the visionary firebrand of The Battle of Algiers (1966) here. He cares about the subject passionately — as a Jew, and as a Communist leader in the Italian Resistance — but he turns it into pap. There are even scenes that fail in direct comparison with Life Is Beautiful, e.g., a translation scene, but played for tears; Nicole evading a camp spotlight, but played for suspense. And somehow Pontecorvo gets the brutality but misses the irrationality. Daney never saw Kapò but he got it right when he wrote, "Pontecorvo neither trembles nor does he feel fear; the concentration camps revolt him purely on an ideological level." (In the work camp one of the women explains to another how low morale has sunk by saying that some of the political prisoners, who we're told make up 50% of the camp, have betrayed "the cause.") Pontecorvo knows how bad it could be for the body but not the being. He later showed himself a master of the medium but Kapò isn't even close to what Lajos Koltai accomplishes in Fateless.