User Reviews

Production on this film started in 1943. The world had been battling the Nazi menace for 4 years. It is set in June 1941, not long after America entered the war. Operation Barbarossa represented Hitler's betrayal of his formal alliance with Stalin. The Russian dictator was said to have been stunned for weeks afterward. At the time, Ukraine was not independent of Russia. In fact, during the period 1930-33 it was forced to collectivize all farms while almost all of its food was shipped to Russia proper. Current historians view it as punishment for their resistance to Soviet rule. At least 4 million Ukrainians starved to death.

With that as background, it is not only absurd - but insulting - to open the film with an idyllic portrayal of life on a Ukrainian farm commune. Well fed, happy peasants were not the norm in 1941. Peasants singing songs with lyrics by Gershwin and music by Copeland are equally ridiculous. In fact, the House Unamerican Activities Committee ordered them cut in 1957 as communist propaganda. They weren't restored until 1976. I watched for a while, but must confess I had to fast forward through at least half of it. Once the Germans strafe a convoy of horse drawn carts returning from an aborted trip to Kyiv, the film picks up. These scenes of Ukrainian resistance are fictional but almost certainly have roots in reality. Because of the superb cast of actors, they pull it off fairly well, Just as contemporary reviewers did (see the 1943 New York Times piece), I found it uplifting to see the heroics of these peasants trod upon by Nazi jackboots. Setting their own village alight to deny the Germans any resources is also a historically accurate depiction of the "scorched earth" policy practiced by the Soviets.

So why is the film such a mess? The screenwriter laboured over it for 7 months. Halfway through she was incensed that Goldwyn himself and the director had changed the plot, dialog, characters and sequence she had written. After a famous shouting match with the studio head, she resigned and bought out her contract. Basically, the producer and director winged it. Keep in mind that Russia was our new ally against the Nazi menace and we needed to show our gratitude for the massive commitment of blood and treasure they were about to make.

Another IMDb reviewer questioned whether the Nazis ever used children for transfusing its wounded soldiers as shown in the film. Absolutely. The practice had just started as filming began. If you search the archives of the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, you will see that the initial "research" for this practice was headed by none other than Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Thousands of children died after being emptied of all their blood. A horrible truth I'm afraid.

If you are genuinely interested in learning what resistance against the Nazis was like, the Daniel Craig vehicle "Defiance" is a much better film in this regard. It is a meticulously researched tale of peasants in Belarus who successfully battled the invaders from lairs in the forests and mountains. I happened to attend the premiere of this feature and had a chance to hear grateful descendants of these fighters attest to its veracity.

The evil German doctor (von Stroheim) foreshadows the true end of this invasion when he talks about the populace being "difficult" foes. Millions of Soviet citizens died, but so did millions of Nazis. Hitler's obsession with taking St. Petersburg in the dead of winter allowed the weather to defeat the German army just as it had done with Napoleon.

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.

I am amazed by the intensity of some of the comments.

The 1943 movie North Star celebrated Stalin's dictatorship over Ukrania, presenting the joys of colectivisation on the humble peasants among whom was the veteran actor Walter Brennan who otherwise played stereotyped American personages. Where the joys of collectivization were simply leftist rot and John Wayne is said to have hated this movie, the movie correctly presents the intensity with which the Russians fought to expel the German invaders. Most German veterans of the Great Patriotic War note that Russians fought on when British or French would have stacked arms and sat by the roadside watching panzers drive by.

The movie of course does not present the other side of the coin. Ukrania was a province where Stalin had his greatest problem. Resentment flared intensely against the Soviet regime particularly in the rural areas which retained their allegiance to the Church and which resented collectivization. Many Ukranians defected to the German cause.

This film of course was shot in 1942 in the heat of the war. I hardly would have deemed it sane to have made a movie about citizens of an allied country who had defected to the enemy.

I do recall that this film went to TV's Million Dollar Movie in the 1950s substantially edited and presented as a German invasion of Hungary and ended with a voice over reference to the Hungarian revolt in 1956.