The North Star (1943 film)

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The North Star
RKO Radio Pictures
Release date
  • November 4, 1943 (1943-11-04)
Running time
106 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$2.8 million (US rentals)[1]

The North Star (also known as Armored Attack in the US) is a 1943 pro-

production design by William Cameron Menzies. The music was written by Aaron Copland, the lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and the cinematography by James Wong Howe. The film also marked the debut of Farley Granger
.

The film is about the resistance of

guerrilla tactics, against the German invaders of the Ukrainian SSR. The film is considered to be pro-Soviet propaganda at the height of the war.[2]

In the 1950s, it was criticized for this reason and it was re-cut to remove the idealized portrayal of Soviet collective farms at the beginning and to include references to the

Hungarian Uprising of 1956
.

Plot

Title card

In June 1941,

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 the Germans send Dr. von Harden to use the village children as a source of blood for transfusions into wounded German soldiers. Some children lose so much blood that they die. When Dr. Pavel Kurin, a famous Ukrainian doctor, discovers this and informs the partisans, they prepare to strike back. They launch a cavalry assault on the village to rescue their families. Kurin accuses von Harden of being worse than the ardent 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

Criticism

The

MGM's Dragon Seed on Chinese efforts against the Japanese occupation.[4]

The extent to which the film incorporated official Soviet propaganda about

collective farms prompted British anti-communist writer Robert Conquest, a member of the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (an anti-communist propaganda unit)[5] 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".[6]

Recut

The film was rereleased in 1957 under the title Armored Attack. This edited version opens with the entry of a German column marching into a village and concludes with narration praising the

Hungarian Uprising of 1956. It was released together with Fred Zinnemann's 1950 film The Men which was also renamed to Battle Stripe.[7]

In later years, the original version was made available on home video restoring segments removed for the 1957 re-release.[8]

Awards

The film was nominated for six Academy Awards:[9]

References

  1. ^ Variety (21 February 2018). "Variety (January 1944)". New York, NY: Variety Publishing Company – via Internet Archive.
  2. ^ a b "The North Star (1943) - Notes - TCM.com".
  3. ^ Murphy, Brenda (1999). "Congressional Theatre" (PDF). catdir.loc.gov. University of Cambridge.
  4. ^ "World War II: Soviet and Japanese Forces Battle at Khalkhin Gol - HistoryNet". 12 June 2006.
  5. ^ "Foreign Office's covert propaganda, Guardian 27 Jan 1978".
  6. ^ 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.
  7. Archive.org
    .
  8. ^ "Turner Classic Movies - TCM.com".
  9. ^ "The 16th Academy Awards (1944) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved 2011-08-14.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The North Star (1943 film).
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