On paper The North Star should be a great film. It was written by the great Lillian Hellman, directed by the great Lewis Milestone, produced by the great Samuel Golwyn and Wulliam Cameron Menzies, and starred the great Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Farley Granger, Dean Jagger, Eric von Stroheim and others. Alas, it was not to be. The film spends too much time on the early set up of the peasants' idyllic lives, and not enough on their transformation into warriors. Much has been made about the "unrealistic" and "unhistoric" portrayal of Ukrainian communal life, and the supposed pro-Communist slant of the film. Those points are all irrelevant now, but at the time this was made to create sympathy for our Russian allies against the Nazis, not to make a realistic or accurate film. And it certainly does well in the category of anti-Nazi propaganda.
Review of The North Star
