The North Star (1943 film)
The North Star | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical poster | |
Directed by | Lewis Milestone |
Written by | Lillian Hellman (story and screenplay) |
Produced by | Samuel Goldwyn William Cameron Menzies |
Starring | Anne Baxter Dana Andrews Walter Huston Walter Brennan Erich von Stroheim |
Cinematography | James Wong Howe |
Edited by | Daniel Mandell |
Music by | Aaron Copland |
Production company | |
Distributed by | RKO Radio Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 108 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $2.8 million (US rentals)[1] |
The North Star (also known as Armored Attack in the US) is a 1943 war film produced by Samuel Goldwyn Productions and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. It was directed by Lewis Milestone, written by Lillian Hellman and featured production design by William Cameron Menzies. The film starred Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan and Erich von Stroheim. The music was written by Aaron Copland, the lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and the cinematography was by James Wong Howe. The film also marked the debut of Farley Granger.
The film is about the resistance of Ukrainian villagers, through guerrilla tactics, against the German invaders of the Ukrainian SSR. The film was an unabashedly pro-Soviet propaganda film at the height of the war.[2]
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 Hungarian Uprising of 1956.[2]
Plot
In June 1941 Ukrainian villagers are living in peace. As the school year ends, 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 German soldiers. 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 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".
Cast
- Anne Baxter as Marina Pavlova
- Dana Andrews as Kolya Simonov
- Walter Huston as Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin
- Walter Brennan as Karp
- Ann Harding as Sophia Pavlova
- Jane Withers as Clavdia Kurina
- Farley Granger as Damian Simonov
- Erich von Stroheim as Dr. von Harden
- Dean Jagger as Rodion Pavlov
- Carl Benton Reid as Boris Stepanich Simonov
- Ann Carter as Olga Pavlova
- Esther Dale as Anna
- Ruth Nelson as Nadya Simonova
Criticism
The House Committee on Un-American Activities would later cite The North Star as one of the three noted examples of pro-Soviet works made by Hollywood, the other two being Warner Brothers' Mission to Moscow (1943) and MGM's Song of Russia (1944). [citation needed] Similar U.S. World War II movies are RKO Radio Pictures's Days of Glory on Russian resistance in the Tula Oblast and MGM's Dragon Seed on Chinese efforts against the Japanese occupation. [citation needed]
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)[3] 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".[4]
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.
In later years, the actual print was made available on video with none of the cut segments[clarification needed] of the 1957 print.
Awards
The film was nominated for six Academy Awards:[5]
- Art Direction (Black-and-White) (Perry Ferguson, Howard Bristol)
- Cinematography (Black-and-White) (James Wong Howe)
- Music (Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) (Aaron Copland)
- Sound Recording (Thomas T. Moulton)
- Special Effects (Clarence Slifer, Ray Binger, Thomas T. Moulton)
- Writing (Original Screenplay) (Lillian Hellman)
References
- ^ "Top Grossers of the Season", Variety, 5 January 1944 p 54
- ^ a b http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/85227/The-North-Star/notes.html
- ^ David Leigh recounts the 30-year history of the Foreign Office's covert propaganda operation
- ^ 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.
- ^ "The 16th Academy Awards (1944) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved 2011-08-14.
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)
- The North Star at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
- The North Star at IMDb
- The North Star is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
- The North Star can be viewed for free on Hulu.
- The North Star AKA "Armored Attack" complete film on YouTube (Classics movie online)
- 1943 films
- 1940s war films
- RKO Pictures films
- American films
- American pro-Soviet propaganda films
- American black-and-white films
- Eastern Front of World War II films
- English-language films
- Films set in Ukraine
- Films directed by Lewis Milestone
- Films about the Soviet Union in the Stalin era
- World War II films made in wartime
- Samuel Goldwyn Productions films
- Screenplays by Lillian Hellman
- Film scores by Aaron Copland