In the art of motion pictures, the depiction of claustrophobia is a challenge: what can a filmmaker do with the inherently “theatrical” concept of enclosure in which spatial restrictions and protagonists' paranoia – as in films dealing with the Holocaust – conspire to prevent free movement? What “landscape” is possible when characters are essentially defined by fear, impatience, or passivity, as in Under the World? The answers afforded by films like Samson, Angry Harvest, Forbidden, and The Boat Is Full suggest that the magnification of a face can be as cinematic as the mobility of a camera – especially when the character being hidden is himself hiding an emotion. The limitation of action to a single room might feel like theater, but the close-up (when used judicially and subtly) makes such scenes radically filmic. Moreover, films like The Condemned of Altona and The Last Metro concern themselves explicitly with theater as an integral component of hiding. By exploring dependence, choice, and occupation within personal relationships, they illuminate these themes on wider political and moral levels as well.

Theater is both the source and narrative center of The Condemned of Altona (I Sequestrati di Altona). Adapted by Abby Mann and Cesare Zavattini fromJean-Paul Sartre's play, this 1962 Italian-American coproduction directed by Vittorio De Sica masterfully incorporates Brecht's play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Like Hamlet's strategy – “The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king” – the interplay of theater and actuality provides much of the drama. The German magnate Gerlach (Fredric March) claims that his son Franz (Maximilian Schell) – a former Nazi officer whose entire company was killed in Smolensk in 1941 – died after being tried in Nuremberg.