Main Cast: Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Farley Granger, Ann Harding
Release Year: 1943
Country: US
Run Time: 108 minutes
Plot
In this bit of WWII propaganda (designed to boost support of America's alliance with Russia against Germany), Kolya (Dana Andrews), Kurin (Walter Huston), Damian (Farley Granger), and Marina (Anne Baxter) are members of a farming collective in the Ukraine known as the North Star. The hard-working but happy members of the North Star find their way of life shattered when Germany, in defiance of previous treaties, storms the nation and begins a brutal occupation. Dr. Otto Von Harden (Erich Von Stroheim) begins gathering children -- who are to be used for blood transfusions and medical experiments. Many of the outraged farmers take to the hills to fight with the anti-Nazi resistance, while those who stay behind bravely destroy precious crops and materiel rather than turn them over to the Nazi war machine. Producer Samuel Goldwyn made The North Star at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose son James was an executive at Goldwyn's studio). Ironically, several members of the film's creative team (including screenwriter Lilian Hellman) later found their motivations for making the film questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, who declared it Communist propaganda. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Part of Hollywood's government-abetted effort at rallying public opinion to the side of the Soviet Union during WWII, North Star ironically became a crucial piece of evidence for the fellow-traveling of its creators during the McCarthy era. Although Lewis Milestone's melodrama is a reasonably well-made piece of propaganda, it's a few cuts below the best work of its A-list talent. The film contrasts the bucolic life of the farming village, its saintly physician, and its utterly wholesome young people with the immeasurable evil of the Nazi invaders who have seized the village in order to drain the blood of its children to treat their wounded. These scenes of involuntary blood donation remain disturbing enough that one understands why they were nearly cut by contemporary censors. Among the film's noteworthy aspects are the subtle performances of Erich von Stroheim as the self-exculpating Nazi doctor and Walter Huston, who invests his godlike village elder with a complexity not found in the script. The simple, spacious score of Aaron Copland is also well-adapted to the rural setting. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
The film is about the resistance of Ukrainian villagers, through guerrilla tactics, against the German invaders of the Ukraine.
The film was an unabashedly pro-Sovietpropaganda film at the height of the war. In the 1950s it was criticised for this reason and it was recut to remove the idealized portrayal of Soviet collective farms at the beginning and to include references to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.
In June 1941 Ukrainian villagers are living in peace. As the schools break up for vacation, a group of friends decide to travel to Kiev for a holiday. To their horror they find themselves attacked by German aircraft, part of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Eventually their village itself is occupied by the Nazis. Meanwhile men and women take to the hills to form partisan militias. The full brutality of the Nazis is revealed when a German doctor (Erich von Stroheim) uses the village children as a source of blood for transfusions into wounded Germans. Some children lose so much blood that they die. A famous Russian doctor (Walter Huston) discovers this and informs the partisans, who prepare to strike back. They launch a cavalry assault on the village to rescue the children. The Russian doctor accuses the German doctor of being worse than the convinced Nazis, because he has has used his skills to support them. He then shoots him. The peasants join together, and one girl envisions a future in which they will "make a free world for all men".
The extent to which the film incorporated official Soviet propaganda about collective farms prompted British historian Robert Conquest, a member of the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (a unit created for the purpose of combating communist influence and promoting anti-communist ideas) [1] in the 1950s to later write "a travesty greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but experienced in [collective-farm conditions] to a degree requiring at least a minimum of restraint."[2]
Recut
The film was rereleased in 1957 under the title of Armored Attack. This version starts with the entry of the German column into the town and ends with narration of Hungarians fighting the Red Army during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
^The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, Conquest, page 321, Oxford Press, 1986; see Chapter 17 for detailed information on the efforts of pro-Soviet Westerns to help the regime cover up the true conditions on the collective farms.
