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Kapo (1960)

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

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2 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Susan Strasberg is the Parisian Jewish teenager who's orphaned by the Nazis and, in order to save herself, becomes in time the heartless 'Kapo' of a Polish concentration camp. The Red Army advances and an escape is effected during which the Kapo (who has by this time fallen in love with Russian inmate Terzieff) redeems herself through self-sacrifice. Pontecorvo, a former commander in the wartime Italian resistance, who co-scripted this luridly realistic film with Franco Solinas, strives to say something about the nature of survival in the pit of degradation, but becomes mired in an overloaded plot peopled with stereotypes and filled out with signposted moral questions. Five years later, having made his mistakes here, the director executed his flawless, harrowing masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers.

Author: JPy

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

Jniech said...

Posted on Aug 12 2010 12:05 When will people learn to call them German concentration camps? Why do people wish to shift the blame onto Poles by calling them Polish concentration camp? You never hear a British POWs who survived the horrific camps in Burma describe them as "Burmese" but rightly as Japanese.

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carlos said...

Posted on Sep 03 2008 00:42 i saw this movie in cuba in the sixtys
i was very young 40 years later i can not forget about this movie was one of the best movie i seen and i saw a lot of movies

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