Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

evening1 This film poses impossible questions.If you had the opportunity to forfeit your own life to save the lives of others, would you? If you chose not to, could you live with yourself?Susan Strasberg as Edith/Nicole is nothing short of amazing as a Parisian child of privilege who is forced to evolve from a tearful innocent into a world-weary ball-breaker, and, finally, resigned martyr. Every bit of her performance is believable.The ensemble of actors who surround her resound with verisimilitude -- Emmanuelle Riva as the ultimate concentration-camp realist; Didi Perego as an idealist who struggles to maintain her dignity and refuses to live without it; Gianni Garko as a Nazi soldier willing to be a friend, and Laurent Terzieff as Sascha, who, as Nicole's recruiter into an escape plot, is exceedingly difficult to read in moral terms.I didn't expect to find a film of this grandeur when I stumbled upon it on TCM. (Maybe the fact that often-scruffy introducer Ben Mankiewicz was wearing a suit should have been a tip-off!) It leaves one with much to ponder.In particular it leaves me marveling that just a few decades after the Holocaust this extreme low point in human history seems to be mentioned so rarely.Perhaps this film should be required viewing for anyone who doesn't want history to repeat itself.

Eumenides_0 My journey with Gillo Pontecorvo started with The Battle of Algiers and continued with Queimada. Now I finally have the pleasure of going back to the movie that first cemented his position as one of the best directors ever, Kapo. Once again he's assisted by the great European screenwriter Franco Solinas, a man who has given so much to world cinema and yet remains forgotten.Kapo is not a movie about revolutions; it's perhaps Pontecorvo's most traditional and intimate movie since it doesn't concern the sweeping history of a country or conflicts between cultures. It simply follows Edith, a Jewish girl returning home after a piano lesson. She arrives just in time to be taken, with her family, by the SS. Through luck, a doctor creates a new, non-Jewish, identity, for her. Her family is sent to Auschwitz, but she goes to a labour camp, where she may survive.What follows is a slow transformation from a shy, innocent girl into a ruthless woman who'll do anything to survive. Her chance comes when she becomes a Kapo, or one of the inmates in charge of the other inmates. She's well fed, well clothed, she has some respect from the German soldiers and inspires terror in the other women. Susan Strasberg becomes the character, always captivating even when she's ruthless. 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. This is not Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful or The Pianist, all hard movies, but in which we see the people helping each other in a good spirit of comradeship. The reality of Kapo resembles more that of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, or Tadeusz Borowski's We Were in Auschwitz, objective, emotionless memoirs about what people would do to survive every day in a concentration camp, of how low they'd go in their degradation, of how their will to survive made them forget morality and decency.Although a bit dated, Kapo remains a great study of the worst side of human nature. 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. What remains is really a powerful story directed with craft and compassion.

siddingo i'm trying to order a video of this incredible movie, & in so doing have seen the comments about it. i haven't seen this movie in about a year, but i must reply in response to the previous viewer's comments. "kapo" is the zenith of film noir, or should i say, the best of the "film nadir." it may be the darkest movie i've seen. the black & white filming certainly intensifies its starkness. when i first innocently viewed "kapo," i remember being initially surprised, then moved, then deeply disturbed. couldn't susan's choices have been any of ours born at the same wrong time, wrong place? only i may not have chosen the heroic finale that susan chose. her choices introduce that question in ourselves--would we have chosen to save others as she did? or would we have preferred to save ourselves? an eternal dilemma that cannot be answered unless we are actually put into her position--God forbid. released in 1959, 14 years after WWII was over, makes me wonder what movies will be made 14 years from now, or should i say, 14 years from when the war in iraq is over... SEE this movie.

taibunsuu-1 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. Thanks to TCM for playing this gem that I'll buy on DVD as soon as it comes out. I'd never even heard of it, and I have seen a LOT of flicks.Susan Strasburg does an incredible job as Nicollete / Edith. Her transformation from shell-shocked victim to cynical survivor is absolutely gripping. The tension in the movie builds to nearly unbearable level and the end simply leaves you scooping your jaw off the floor.This is the type of movie I sorely needed after going on a loooong dry spell of celluloid garbage. Why this movie isn't famous, I have no idea, but it should be.