Behind Barbed Wire

Kapo examines in excruciating detail the plight of women prisoners in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. Like all recitals of Nazi horrors, this Italian-made film, dubbed in English, is often stark and terrifying, and Director Gillo Pontecorvo gives his best scenes a look of grainy newsreel authenticity: half-frozen women laying railroad ties gaze hopelessly at wisps of smoke coming from a heated glass shed; the prisoners primp for a ghastly fitness inspection in which signs of illness, or too many grey hairs, can spell the difference between life and death; or they stand in a snowy field singing and shivering around a great barren tree while the commandant wishes all a merry Christmas.

But the film's effectiveness fades be cause of an unconvincing plot, more agonized than acted by Susan Strasberg, who appears in a cold-blooded analogue of the Anne Frank role in which she first won fame on Broadway. Cast as a French adolescent, she conceals her Jewish origin, volunteers as a playmate for the SS in order to get food, steals the socks off a dead comrade who once saved her life, and finally becomes a dread Kapo--"head" or trusty--who assumes guard duties, wielding a rubber truncheon against fellow inmates. This unsympathetic behavior nearly amounts to a forceful statement about the corruption of human values under stress, except that the beast in Actress Strasberg is patently far too tame. Cast as a bossy, driving turn-cat, she somehow remains pensive and soulful-eyed, falls predictably in love with a handsome P.W., and dies heroically just as Soviet guns begin to boom beyond the surrounding hills.

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