Film Review: The North Star (1943)

There are many Hollywood films made obscure for the simple reason of their authors being too embarrassed by them, or for some reason wishing they had never been made. Sometimes the source of that embarrassment has actually little to do with the quality of the film itself or anything to do with its makers. One such example can be found in The North Star, a 1943 war drama directed by Lewis Milestone.

The film is set in North Star, a fictional collective farm (kolkhoz) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The plot begins on 20 June 1941, during the last day of school. Following the festivities, a group of young villagers head to Kiev where they are about to enrol in university. However, on 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launches its invasion of the Soviet Union and North Star gets bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe, causing major loss of life and injuries. The kolkhoz authorities gather all able-bodied men to head to the hills and resist the invaders as partisans, while the rest are ordered to burn the village down to prevent the enemy from using it. German motorised columns arrive in the village and set up a hospital, where it soon becomes apparent that German military doctors are forcibly taking blood from children to use for transfusions. When they learn about this, the partisans stage a desperate raid to free the children.

The North Star was made during the Second World War. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had recruited Hollywood for war propaganda efforts, which also included a series of films that promoted America's allies and praised their patriotism and sacrifices as inspiration for Americans themselves. The Soviet Union was among those allies, and the task in this particular case was taken on by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. The North Star received a fairly large budget for 1940s standards, and also boasted quite an impressive collection of talent. The script was written by the renowned playwright Lillian Hellman; cinematography was provided by Oscar laureate James Wong Howe; the soundtrack was composed by Aaron Copland, one of the most prominent American composers of the time; and Ira Gershwin wrote the songs. The North Star was an ensemble piece and lacked proper stars, but the cast was nevertheless impressive. It included Oscar-winning character actor Walter Huston as the village physician, Dr Kurin; another Oscar-winning character actor, Walter Brennan, as the elderly villager Karp; and the iconic Erich von Stroheim in the role of Doctor von Haden, a cynical German military physician. Among the younger actors, future Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter played Marina Pavlova, daughter of the kolkhoz director (played by Dean Jagger); Dana Andrews played Soviet Air Force pilot Kolya Simonov; and Farley Granger, future star of Hitchcock films, had his first major role as Marina’s love interest, Damian Simonov.

The film was directed by Lewis Milestone, a veteran best known for his 1930 war classic All Quiet on the Western Front. Despite all this talent, The North Star turned out to be a major disappointment. While it is tempting to point towards crude pro-Soviet propaganda as the main reason (together with Hellman’s alleged Communist sympathies), the real problem with this film is conceptual. It begins as a depiction of pastoral, almost idyllic life on the collective farm, accompanied by dance and song numbers. Some of these songs are good, like the patriotic anthem ‘Wide Is My Motherland’ (‘borrowed’ from the 1936 Soviet musical comedy Circus), but others are dreadful. For the first half, The North Star plays out like a musical comedy, and not a particularly original or inspired one (much inferior to its 1930s Soviet counterparts). Things get serious around the halfway point when the war starts, including some disturbing scenes of innocent children being among the victims of German bombing. The depiction of the German occupation, which includes the deliberate torture of women and vampiric treatment of children, also looks like rather crude propaganda—although the real atrocities committed by the Nazis at the time were much worse and probably beyond the screenwriter’s imagination. Lewis Milestone, who had reconstructed one world war so well in All Quiet on the Western Front, does the other world war much less convincingly in The North Star. There are scenes drenched in bathos, like Kolya using his damaged plane to destroy a German armoured column in a kamikaze-style attack, or the rather chaotic night combat. Milestone partially redeems himself with a well-directed final showdown between the partisans and the Germans in the village, but it happens too late to improve the general impression.

The North Star, despite this, received good reviews and six Oscar nominations, although the results at the box office weren’t particularly impressive. After the war, when the alliance between the USA and the Soviet Union gave way to the Cold War, its pro-Soviet stance became a source of embarrassment for anyone involved. During the McCarthy era, the House Un-American Activities Committee named it as proof of Communist influence in Hollywood, and this served as justification for purges and blacklists. In 1957, the Samuel Goldwyn Company tried to salvage its reputation by cutting the film in a way that removed all references to the Soviet Union and instead added contemporary stock footage and narration praising the 1956 Hungarian Uprising to portray the Soviets as tyrannical villains. This version, known under the title Armored Attack—which had replaced one sort of propaganda with another—was for many years the only one available. Nowadays, audiences can look at The North Star mostly as a curiosity, but also as a depressing reminder that some things haven’t changed much in eighty years and that we still have to deal with destructive wars, as well as the Hollywood machine that justifies them.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

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