Kapo (1960).....was the first among the few feature length fiction films directed by famed Italian documentarian Gillo Pontecorvo, Six years after this brutal Nazi concentration camp drama, Pontecorvo would shake the cinema world to its core with his stunning "Battle Of Algiers", his gritty docu-like recreation of the Algerian rebels' war for independence against France.
"Kapo" follows the hellish journey of Edith (American actress Susan Strasberg) a 14 year old Parisian Jewish girl who along with her parents, ends up transported to a concentration camp......where they're headed for almost certain extinction.
Capricious fate intervenes, and Edith manages to stay alive by assuming the identity of 'Nicole' the kind of common criminal inmate who's consigned to the tortuous forced labor of the camp, where; she and her fellow women prisoners barely eke out an existence on the the scraps of food provided by their SS captors.
Under Pontecorvo's neo-realism, urgent direction, the ambitious film unflinchingly depicts the operation of a Holocaust Nazi death camp, with hundred of victims force marched, brutalized and routinely executed. It doesn't take all that long to turn the gentle innocent Edith into a hardened and cold-hearted survivor, offering herself up as a sexual prize to German officers in exchange for some precious food.
As an additional way to avoid death, Edith fully embraces the chance to become an infamous 'Kapo' those camp inmates who become assistant overseers to the SS guards, often tormenting and assaulting their fellow prisoners with the same cruel ferocity as the Germans.
Stepping up to the enormous challenge of such a role, Strasberg, with her huge expressive eyes, make a haunting, memorable centerpiece to the film. Her once warm heart turned icy, only love, in the form of a newly arrived Russian prisoner of war brings back her humanity.......and inevitable, horrific doom for the entire camp as she helps him organize a mass escape attempt..
It's a powerful piece of work that still demands attention today more than ever.........especially now with the ugly rise of hate-filled Trumpian authoritarianism infecting the USA and the world like an ever growing cancer.
Long forgotten in the history of foreign films, 'Kapo' can be viewed as one of the Criterion Collection's titles in their "Essential Art House" series. And essential it sure as hell is.....4 stars (****).
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