Aubrey Malone
Lilli Palmer. Photo: Public Domain Recent conflicts in Gaza and Palestine have caused many people to reflect anew on the holocaust of World War II. In such circumstances, it might be timely to re-view the 1959 film Conspiracy of Hearts.
Featuring Lilli Palmer as the Mother Superior of an Italian convent, this is a moving work dealing with the efforts of a group of Catholic nuns to free orphaned Jewish children from concentration camps and transport them to foster homes in Palestine towards the end of the war.
It’s interesting for the manner in which it depicts the burgeoning rift between the Italian and German soldiers. The Italians revolt against the bloodthirsty Colonel Horsten (Albert Lieven) in a scene where they’re ordered to kill three of the nuns, turning their guns on Horsten instead. In a subplot, the Italian Major Spoletti (Ronald Lewis) develops a crush on a novice in the convent (Sylvia Syms).
The film is also interesting for its appreciation of Jewish culture. The nuns have to ‘educate’ themselves about the significance of Yom Kippur in an early scene where the children berate themselves for having broken the Jewish fast.
A rabbi is later smuggled into the convent for a service. When the Nazis step up their campaign against partisan Italian activity, which has caused the dynamiting of some German supply trains, he’s shot. So is a farmer helping to transport the children to the convent.
The film was made mainly at Pinewood Studios. Director Ralph Thomas makes no attempt to have his cast use Italian accents. Some of the children remind one of actors from Oliver Twist. And Sylvia Syms sounds like, well, Sylvia Syms.
But the acting is impressive, particularly that of Palmer. Her willingness to martyr herself for the cause never becomes saccharine. Even under a sentence of death she manages to banter with Horsten.
Neither is he a one-dimensional figure. Though ruthless, he makes it clear that it gives him no pleasure to execute nuns – or children. When Spoletti puts it to him that he’s acting unreasonably in his actions, he replies, “If an army were totally reasonable, it wouldn’t fight at all.”
Earlier he describes one of his subordinates (a bloodthirsty stereotype of the ‘Evil Nazi’) as “an invaluable man – completely obedient, completely stupid. With a regiment like him, I could conquer the world.” Spoletti replies laconically, “Haven’t you such an arrangement already?”
Most moving of all in this heartbreaking cameo of the war is a scene where the children are asked to make a list of loved ones they’ve lost. A little girl with a face that exudes pain says, “My father, my mother, my sisters, my aunt.” When Syms asks for their names, she says, “I can’t remember.” Then she breaks down in tears.
It’s details like this, as much as the documentary footage of Nazi cruelty at the beginning of the film, that bring home the full horrors of the Holocaust.