I saw "Lisa" exactly one time, many decades ago, when I was a kid. I watched it on a black and white TV, late at night, interrupted by many annoying commercials. I've never forgotten "Lisa": Dolores Hart played a Holocaust survivor determined, by any means necessary, to get to Palestine at a time when the British were interdicting such arrivals. Ruggedly handsome Stephen Boyd was Inspector Jongman. He began by hindering Lisa's pilgrimage and ended up helping her. For comic relief, there was Hugh Griffith, a smuggler who used a tennis racket in his ongoing battle with the bats that invaded his exotic Tangiers apartment at dusk.
Most importantly, I never shook the feeling that the film aroused in me – this film literally made me sick, and terrified, but it also moved and inspired me.
In the intervening years, I read somewhere that "Lisa" was an early attempt to depict the Holocaust in a mainstream Hollywood movie. That just increased my curiosity. Some kind soul has finally posted "Lisa" on youtube and I watched it there.
The title sequence appears over train tracks, rushing rapidly beneath the camera. This allusion to trains rushing to concentration camps felt heavy-handed. The film opens in 1946. Lisa is the pouty, passive cargo of a Nazi white slaver. There's some implausible cloak and dagger stuff – the daggers are SS, engraved "blood and honor" – and for sale by the Nazi white slaver, a villain with obviously dyed blonde hair and an obviously fake German accent. The Nazi dies; Lisa escapes via a fire escape; investigators suspect that Inspector Jongman murdered the Nazi. The chase / road movie is on. Lisa and Jongman begin a cat-and-mouse odyssey, via Dutch canal barge and smuggler ship, to Palestine.
After my decades-long wait to see "Lisa" again, these opening scenes disappointed me. I thought, "Gee, we've come a long way since 1962. This ain't no "Schindler's List." Lisa is merely an object. The Nazi controls her; the good Dutch man wants her. She volunteered to go with the Nazi, stupidly falling for his lie that he would smuggle her to Palestine. And Lisa is obviously NOT Jewish. Dolores Hart was famously Catholic; she's got bright blue eyes and blond hair. English, Irish, and American actors try, or don't, to speak with slipping and sliding Dutch, German, or Arabic accents.
Lisa is a survivor of medical experimentation at Auschwitz. She had been used "like a cadaver" in gynecological training. Jongman wants to help Lisa because he had failed to help Rachel, his Jewish fiancée. The Holocaust is translated from genocide into a titillating morals charge or the plot twist in a risqué romance novel. Though the center of this crime against women is a woman, Lisa, the film is really all about the men around her: Jongman, the Nazi, the police chasing them, the colorful smugglers aiding them, exploiting them, or ripping them off.
I kept watching, though, and in spite of all the problems, I rediscovered the movie that had so moved me years ago. Lisa's blondeness adds to the horror, in the same way that Jeanne Crain's whiteness added to the impact of "Pinky." Casting a white woman as a victim of Jim Crow, or a Catholic as a Jew, emphasizes that there is no logic nor justice to racism. We humans really ARE one race, and none of us can rely on our putative racial identity, or our physical features, for immunity.
As Bowsley Crowther pointed out in his New York Times review, the film's "lurid" advertisements are not representational of the film's "decent" and "asexual" content. In any case, Lisa's intimate victimization, and her literal sterility, economically and powerfully communicate the Nazis' sadism and nihilism.
There is a scene in this movie that I have never forgotten. Though, in the intervening years, I've seen too much graphic violence, I was afraid to re-watch this scene. Lisa describes how she was used as a medical display. In her flashback, all you see is what Lisa saw: the overheard medical lamps, and doctors' eyes staring at her clinically, as if she were, indeed, a cadaver. Lisa concludes her flashback by saying, "I wanted to say to them, we are people, we are human beings." The scene includes no special effects. It is one of the most high-impact Holocaust scenes, or depictions of dehumanization, that I've ever seen.
Lisa has been betrayed by the world. She survives by telling herself that Palestine is that somewhere-over-the-rainbow that can restore her will to live. Her goal and her intensity are palpable, both poignant and steely.
Dolores Hart is something to behold. She radiates rare beauty and depth. She and Boyd develop genuine chemistry; you come to care about their fate. Robert Stephens, in a small part as an Englishman who is, alternately, oafish, cloying, threatening, and moving, punctuates the final act of the film. There is an ideological smuggler, Brown, who wants to use Lisa to his own purposes; this subplot underlines how sometimes the highest ideals can inspire exploitative behavior. The theme of noble sacrifice is believable and moving.
"Lisa" is based on Jan de Hartog's novel. He was the son of a Dutch minister and a convert to Quakerism. As a child he ran away, and lived on barges. During the war he aided in the hiding of Jewish babies; he hid from the Nazis disguised as a woman. Dolores Hart, who plays Lisa, left Hollywood at the height of her career to become a cloistered nun.
Most importantly, I never shook the feeling that the film aroused in me – this film literally made me sick, and terrified, but it also moved and inspired me.
In the intervening years, I read somewhere that "Lisa" was an early attempt to depict the Holocaust in a mainstream Hollywood movie. That just increased my curiosity. Some kind soul has finally posted "Lisa" on youtube and I watched it there.
The title sequence appears over train tracks, rushing rapidly beneath the camera. This allusion to trains rushing to concentration camps felt heavy-handed. The film opens in 1946. Lisa is the pouty, passive cargo of a Nazi white slaver. There's some implausible cloak and dagger stuff – the daggers are SS, engraved "blood and honor" – and for sale by the Nazi white slaver, a villain with obviously dyed blonde hair and an obviously fake German accent. The Nazi dies; Lisa escapes via a fire escape; investigators suspect that Inspector Jongman murdered the Nazi. The chase / road movie is on. Lisa and Jongman begin a cat-and-mouse odyssey, via Dutch canal barge and smuggler ship, to Palestine.
After my decades-long wait to see "Lisa" again, these opening scenes disappointed me. I thought, "Gee, we've come a long way since 1962. This ain't no "Schindler's List." Lisa is merely an object. The Nazi controls her; the good Dutch man wants her. She volunteered to go with the Nazi, stupidly falling for his lie that he would smuggle her to Palestine. And Lisa is obviously NOT Jewish. Dolores Hart was famously Catholic; she's got bright blue eyes and blond hair. English, Irish, and American actors try, or don't, to speak with slipping and sliding Dutch, German, or Arabic accents.
Lisa is a survivor of medical experimentation at Auschwitz. She had been used "like a cadaver" in gynecological training. Jongman wants to help Lisa because he had failed to help Rachel, his Jewish fiancée. The Holocaust is translated from genocide into a titillating morals charge or the plot twist in a risqué romance novel. Though the center of this crime against women is a woman, Lisa, the film is really all about the men around her: Jongman, the Nazi, the police chasing them, the colorful smugglers aiding them, exploiting them, or ripping them off.
I kept watching, though, and in spite of all the problems, I rediscovered the movie that had so moved me years ago. Lisa's blondeness adds to the horror, in the same way that Jeanne Crain's whiteness added to the impact of "Pinky." Casting a white woman as a victim of Jim Crow, or a Catholic as a Jew, emphasizes that there is no logic nor justice to racism. We humans really ARE one race, and none of us can rely on our putative racial identity, or our physical features, for immunity.
As Bowsley Crowther pointed out in his New York Times review, the film's "lurid" advertisements are not representational of the film's "decent" and "asexual" content. In any case, Lisa's intimate victimization, and her literal sterility, economically and powerfully communicate the Nazis' sadism and nihilism.
There is a scene in this movie that I have never forgotten. Though, in the intervening years, I've seen too much graphic violence, I was afraid to re-watch this scene. Lisa describes how she was used as a medical display. In her flashback, all you see is what Lisa saw: the overheard medical lamps, and doctors' eyes staring at her clinically, as if she were, indeed, a cadaver. Lisa concludes her flashback by saying, "I wanted to say to them, we are people, we are human beings." The scene includes no special effects. It is one of the most high-impact Holocaust scenes, or depictions of dehumanization, that I've ever seen.
Lisa has been betrayed by the world. She survives by telling herself that Palestine is that somewhere-over-the-rainbow that can restore her will to live. Her goal and her intensity are palpable, both poignant and steely.
Dolores Hart is something to behold. She radiates rare beauty and depth. She and Boyd develop genuine chemistry; you come to care about their fate. Robert Stephens, in a small part as an Englishman who is, alternately, oafish, cloying, threatening, and moving, punctuates the final act of the film. There is an ideological smuggler, Brown, who wants to use Lisa to his own purposes; this subplot underlines how sometimes the highest ideals can inspire exploitative behavior. The theme of noble sacrifice is believable and moving.
"Lisa" is based on Jan de Hartog's novel. He was the son of a Dutch minister and a convert to Quakerism. As a child he ran away, and lived on barges. During the war he aided in the hiding of Jewish babies; he hid from the Nazis disguised as a woman. Dolores Hart, who plays Lisa, left Hollywood at the height of her career to become a cloistered nun.