A Masterpiece!

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A slew of Hollywood studio regulars (Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter, Farley Granger, Dean Jagger) do an absolutely terrible job convincing us that they're rural Russians in this bit of WWII propaganda from 1943. The film details what happens when this peaceful Russian community is invaded by Nazis. The younger folk, who are traveling to a larger city for a holiday, find themselves thrown into combat on the road, while the villagers deal with the ransacking of their homes. The film laments the loss of innocence and the necessity for war, but the way it goes about it is nearly ridiculous by today's standards. The first hour or so of the film shows us what life for a typical Russian peasant is like, which according to this film includes breaking into song and dance every five minutes no matter what you're doing and celebrating the joys of being Russian. I've seen musicals that don't have as much music in them as this movie.Still, much can be forgiven in these studio products of the war years, since their first goal was to keep up morale and only secondarily cared at all about the art of actual film making. They're interesting in the context of film's place in popular culture but they're not interesting films, if that makes any sense."The North Star" was amazingly nominated for six Academy Awards when it comes across today as a B movie, and not even a very good one at that. Lillian Hellman, of all people, won her second and last nomination for the film's original screenplay, while it racked up five nominations in the technical categories of b&w art direction, b&w cinematography, dramatic or comedy score, sound recording, and special effects.Grade: C+

Yesterday on TCM I came into the middle of a movie where I immediately recognized one of my favorite actors, Dana Andrews, and recognized the unmistakable voice of Walter Brennan even when his face was covered with the beard of a Slavic Patriarch. Looking them both up along with IMDb on my cell phone internet connection led me to North Star (1943). I followed the movie to its conclusion and discovered that although I found it to be a likely bit of war propaganda, that such rah-rah-whatever-side-the-USA-happens-to-support-at-the-time films probably resonate with me, even when they're sort of corny and propagandistic. Some of the charges made in the movie against the Wehrmacht were so seemingly outrageous that I decided to do further research, and eventually came to your website again and read Varlaam's review and more thoroughly looked at the credits and so forth and discovered that the scriptwriter was - uh oh - Lillian Hellman.Varlaam was correct to point out that when the Germans invaded Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, they were greeted as liberators, indeed I have personally seen film footage of Ukrainian women throwing roses in the paths of German soldiers. This was because the Ukrainians were starving (over 7 million of them by that point), which fact was caused by Soviet Collective Farming. Malcolm Muggeridge of course exposed the Ukrainian starvation, while the New York Times' Walter Duranty covered it up. This then begs the question: why WOULD Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, etc. lend their names to a film of this sort? Moreover, who would write it? The answer is that Lillian Hellman wrote it. Lillian Hellman was such an unrepentant Communist that she actually praised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.The really sad part is that an important feature of the movie, the use of Russian children by the Wehrmacht as human blood banks, appears potentially to be true. Yet there were only two hits on the first page of google hits that are NOT false positives when you type in Nazis used children as blood banks, and only one of those two (the top two) was a serious historical journal article, the other merely a chat board discussion. It's mentioned in the historical article that the Soviets mentioned this charge at Nuremburg, and it's the one charge that got dropped. Is it possible that, given Hellman's reputation, that she was seen as a biased boy crying wolf? Who knows? I'd be curious to know if there are others who, like me, tend to like the really mushy "mainstream of American 'thought'" (or perhaps I should say, 'feelings') movies of the 1940s (perhaps the influence of my parents) but who, having become older and wiser, wonder how much of what they "know" about reality is influenced by films with a fairly biased perspective. The sad part of Hellman's movie is that the most shocking part of her movie may be true, but unfortunately has largely gone into the dustbin of history due to the fact that her perhaps justified charge against the Wehrmacht has been thrown out with the bathwater of her Communist ideology.

This is a story of German invasion towards the East during World War II, and the civilian guerrilla forces that came of it.As such, it must be compared to COME AND SEE, a pretty well made film, but with a touch too much obvious Hollywood "rationalization".The rationalization of COME AND SEE is that it is obviously told from a perspective of freedom fighters who want to "rationalize" their desertion and abandonment of other civilians to horrible fates. In such guerrilla activity, one doesn't have to see modern films to know that their warfare will cause counter terror upon the women, children, and sick left behind. One doesn't have to be "educated" to know this. Any child knows the repercussions.So COME AND SEE is very obvious in this, as freedom fighters try to justify their cowardice in abandoning others, by demonetizing the enemy.Trouble is, the Nazis don't have to be demonetized. They do a good job of that themselves.And we get a much more realistic demonstration in THE NORTH STAR of the demon Nazi machine. True, there are a few wackos who laugh while they kill as in COME AND SEE, but THE NORTH STAR gives us the true picture. Two German doctors, who act as leaders of the invasion force, are given total focus of the enemy motives. They are very different, and cruel in different respects. They are three dimensional characters, unlike the caricatures of COME AND SEE.Likewise, the leaders of the resistance admit they are leaving the population behind to face the worst of consequences. Unlike COME AND SEE, they don't try to rationalize their desertion. They confess it, and in doing so, are characters we can actually care about. They know they have a huge responsibility, and they do what they can.And being made closer to the source, in the midst of the action, THE NORTH STAR is logically going to be more realistic.The movie flows very well, beginning with the "status quo", as films like this are the model for such modern classics at "Fellowship of the Ring", in which we begin with the status quo of the shire (after a preliminary introduction of high octane action, but that is a prologue).And the status quo beginning is well done. There is no gun play for almost half the film, yet it still flows, because we have constant movement, some singing, some scenery, and it helps us to follow the characters.Don't get me wrong. I'm not, by any means, one who likes lull, and my attention deficit disorder will rival anyone's, but I was never lulled to sleep by this film, and over 80% of the movies made after 1965 lull me to sleep with slow pacing. This is well paced. There may not be "killings" and "throat cuttings" abounding in the first half, but there is movement and animation.This is smartly directed, and justifies itself as art.

My parents took me to see this film at the Rex cinema in Hanworth England in 1943. I was 6 years old! About half way through the film, there was an air raid. We had to leave the cinema and go to a shelter. I remember the story and especially the song, which the children were singing on the cart. The film has been shown many times on television, but I have never been able to watch it. I guess that this must have some connection with the air raid. I am now 74 years old and the film is being shown again on television tomorrow afternoon. I hope to finally be able to watch it all the way through, at long last and lay to rest whatever has prevented me doing so previously.I have finally seen this film to the end! Not bad after 68 years. I now realise why it made such an impression on me. In the film, the children and some adults were bombed and machine gunned by aircraft, after jumping from the carts into a ditch. It was at this point that we had to leave the cinema because of an air raid, having just seen children killed on the screen. I had already experienced many air raids at the age of 3 years and 9 months, during the Septmber 1940 Blitz and I still have vivid memories of the bombing, destruction and fires. Am I correct, or is my memory failing in that I believe the original title for the U.K release was 'The Red Star'???