World War II was an opportunity for a number of left oriented screenwriters to further their agenda of praising the Soviet Union under the disingenuous moniker of anti-fascism. One such screenwriter was famed playwright of the time, Lillian Hellman, who maintained that she wrote The North Star to expose Nazism for what it was.
True the US was allied with the Soviet Union at the time in a two front war against the Germans. Thus a propaganda piece such as this which held the enemy of my enemy is my friend, was a wholly acceptable strategy.
In the 1950s Hellman was blacklisted for her Communist sympathies and the film was chopped up in with the first part of the story excised and renamed "Armored Attack." Actually it might not have been such a bad idea to chop up The North Star as the exposition was a complete fraud for numerous reasons.
First and foremost, we are presented with an idyllic picture of happy Ukrainian peasants who are suddenly attacked by the German Army in what was dubbed Operation Barbarossa. In actuality the Ukrainians had been fighting the Soviets (originally Bolsheviks) since the Russian civil war in 1917. They endured a horrific famine during the 1930s which may have been engineered by Stalin and subject to purges of the ruthless dictator's real or imagined enemies.
So when the Germans first occupied Ukraine in 1941, they were welcomed as liberators. It was only a result of their later punitive treatment of the civilian population including the use of slave labor that turned the Ukrainians against them.
The German scorched earth tactics depicted here in which men, women and children were killed by bombings and machine gun fire from planes occurred in other parts of the Soviet Union where there was perhaps less enmity toward the central Soviet government.
No attempt was made to have any of the characters speak with a foreign accent. Instead they all seem thoroughly Americanized compromising the film's verisimilitude. What's worse is that the Ukrainians are one-dimensional saints failing to display one iota of resentment toward their Soviet rulers.
The best part of the film probably is the depiction of the ruthlessness of the German Army. The aforementioned Luftwaffe bombings and machine gun strafing is only a portent of things to come for the Ukrainian villagers. When the Germans finally arrive they attempt to find out who was responsible for the setting of the many of the thatched roof huts on fire and end up torturing Sophia, one of the villagers we met earlier, by breaking her arm and leg.
Walter Brennan has one of the main roles as Karp, a pig farmer, who transports rifles to the men in the village who have now become partisan guerillas up in the hills. Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter round out the principals in the large cast.
The famed director Ernst Lubitsch plays the chief German medical officer Dr. Von Harden and is chiefly responsible for forcing children in the village to undergo blood transfusions. For those who question that the Germans did such a thing, I call your attention to a report from the Jewish Telegraph Agency in May of 1943 in which the German Army was accused of using thousands of Jewish children for blood transfusions. Apparently the Nazi theory of Jewish racial inferiority was ignored in the name of expediency (given the necessities of war).
Notably the film carefully notes the high status afforded to those involved in the medical profession for "protecting the public health" has always been the perfect pretext for the institution of draconian authoritarian measures. This was particularly true in Nazi Germany as it is now.
Walter Huston who plays Dr. Kurin has the most dramatic moment in the film when he blames von Harden for his moral cowardice-knowing what he is doing is a crime against humanity. He shoots von Harden and his assistant in revenge for the horrific treatment of the children.
The successful cavalry charge at film's end gives the wrong impression of what actually happened in the first half of the conflict between the Soviet Army and the German oppressors. They were thoroughly routed until the tide turned at Stalingrad. For propaganda purposes, the depiction of a victory against the Germans was a noble necessity as the war was still raging when the picture was released in 1943.
From a modern perspective, The North Star represents an egregious distortion of history. The characters were created for one purpose in mind-further the war effort. In that perhaps it was successful at the time. But in terms of film history, it has little to no resonance today.
True the US was allied with the Soviet Union at the time in a two front war against the Germans. Thus a propaganda piece such as this which held the enemy of my enemy is my friend, was a wholly acceptable strategy.
In the 1950s Hellman was blacklisted for her Communist sympathies and the film was chopped up in with the first part of the story excised and renamed "Armored Attack." Actually it might not have been such a bad idea to chop up The North Star as the exposition was a complete fraud for numerous reasons.
First and foremost, we are presented with an idyllic picture of happy Ukrainian peasants who are suddenly attacked by the German Army in what was dubbed Operation Barbarossa. In actuality the Ukrainians had been fighting the Soviets (originally Bolsheviks) since the Russian civil war in 1917. They endured a horrific famine during the 1930s which may have been engineered by Stalin and subject to purges of the ruthless dictator's real or imagined enemies.
So when the Germans first occupied Ukraine in 1941, they were welcomed as liberators. It was only a result of their later punitive treatment of the civilian population including the use of slave labor that turned the Ukrainians against them.
The German scorched earth tactics depicted here in which men, women and children were killed by bombings and machine gun fire from planes occurred in other parts of the Soviet Union where there was perhaps less enmity toward the central Soviet government.
No attempt was made to have any of the characters speak with a foreign accent. Instead they all seem thoroughly Americanized compromising the film's verisimilitude. What's worse is that the Ukrainians are one-dimensional saints failing to display one iota of resentment toward their Soviet rulers.
The best part of the film probably is the depiction of the ruthlessness of the German Army. The aforementioned Luftwaffe bombings and machine gun strafing is only a portent of things to come for the Ukrainian villagers. When the Germans finally arrive they attempt to find out who was responsible for the setting of the many of the thatched roof huts on fire and end up torturing Sophia, one of the villagers we met earlier, by breaking her arm and leg.
Walter Brennan has one of the main roles as Karp, a pig farmer, who transports rifles to the men in the village who have now become partisan guerillas up in the hills. Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter round out the principals in the large cast.
The famed director Ernst Lubitsch plays the chief German medical officer Dr. Von Harden and is chiefly responsible for forcing children in the village to undergo blood transfusions. For those who question that the Germans did such a thing, I call your attention to a report from the Jewish Telegraph Agency in May of 1943 in which the German Army was accused of using thousands of Jewish children for blood transfusions. Apparently the Nazi theory of Jewish racial inferiority was ignored in the name of expediency (given the necessities of war).
Notably the film carefully notes the high status afforded to those involved in the medical profession for "protecting the public health" has always been the perfect pretext for the institution of draconian authoritarian measures. This was particularly true in Nazi Germany as it is now.
Walter Huston who plays Dr. Kurin has the most dramatic moment in the film when he blames von Harden for his moral cowardice-knowing what he is doing is a crime against humanity. He shoots von Harden and his assistant in revenge for the horrific treatment of the children.
The successful cavalry charge at film's end gives the wrong impression of what actually happened in the first half of the conflict between the Soviet Army and the German oppressors. They were thoroughly routed until the tide turned at Stalingrad. For propaganda purposes, the depiction of a victory against the Germans was a noble necessity as the war was still raging when the picture was released in 1943.
From a modern perspective, The North Star represents an egregious distortion of history. The characters were created for one purpose in mind-further the war effort. In that perhaps it was successful at the time. But in terms of film history, it has little to no resonance today.