The North Star (1943)

 

The North Star features a lot more singing than you’d expect in a war movie set during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The film’s music was written by one of our greatest composers, Aaron Copland (who received an Oscar nomination for his work here), and the lyrics are by the renowned Ira Gershwin, so it’s pretty good music. The plot begins with about thirty minutes of idyllic life in a farming village outside Kiev (now Kyiv, the modern-day capital of Ukraine). It’s the last day of school for the year, and a group of five young people are planning their trip to the larger city. So the peasants sing a lot, and why not? They sing at the school, they sing in the village at what appears to be some sort of outdoor festival, and the five young travelers sing on their way to Kiev. The five include Dana Andrews as Kolya Siminov, a pilot trainee in the Soviet air corps; an impossibly young and beautiful Farley Granger in his film debut as Kolya’s younger brother Damian, who’ll be a student at the University of Kiev in the fall; Anne Baxter (always looking like she’s plotting her next move) as Damien’s girlfriend Marina Pavlov; Jane Withers (of all people) as Marina’s close friend, Clavdia Kurin; and Eric Roberts (no, certainly not that one) as Grisha, Clavdia’s younger brother. After they’ve journeyed for a while (and, naturally, sung a few songs), they hear airplanes. We too can hear the faint noise of the plane engines before they appear on the screen. The Nazis attack, killing everyone in sight; only a few people on the road (including, at least temporarily) our five travelers. The Nazis are on their way to the village, apparently the North Star of the film’s title, in order to take care of their wounded. The men of the village realize that the Nazis will kill everyone they encounter, so they leave to defend the village but also leave orders for those who stay behind to destroy everything if the Nazis make it through. You’ve certainly seen enough World War II movies to know that the Nazis do, indeed, make it to the village before it can be destroyed, and they commit such a horrific act that it’s impossible to believe that something like that could happen while simultaneously believing that it’s exactly what could have happened. They start draining the blood of the children of the village to save wounded Nazis, sometimes taking so much blood that the child dies. The men of the village plan an attack, and the film features some outstanding stuntwork during that counterattack by the villagers. The North Star is also beautifully photographed by the great James Wong Howe. There’s a stark brightness and visual clarity in the scenes of village life before the Nazi attack, and those moments are clearly contrasted with a darkness for the scenes where the villagers try to reclaim their homeland. Lots of famed character actors appear in the film, including Walter Brennan as a farmer/wagon driver. (He was always stuck driving a wagon in his movies, wasn’t he?). Walter Huston is the town doctor and father to Clavdia and Grisha. Even Erich von Stroheim shows up as a Nazi doctor who’s apparently supposed to be sympathetic because he knows that what he’s doing is wrong (and that what the Nazis are doing is wrong). Of course, that’s complete bullshit, and the film doesn’t exactly make him seem very human at all by the end of the first sequence where a child is drained of blood and collapses in Huston’s arms to die. SIDE NOTE: I find it interesting that the House Un-American Activities Committee, that fabled band of deep thinkers, considered this film to be too pro-Soviet during the early years of the Cold War when they were trying to find Communists under every rock they could. Of course, the Soviets were our allies during World War II, and the film is set during 1941 before the United States entered the war. Lots of films were made during the war years to show support for our soldiers and perhaps sympathy for our allies fighting against the Nazis and the Axis powers. I didn’t quite see the film as so much pro-Soviet as it is strongly anti-Nazi. The screenwriter, Lillian Hellman, was certainly known as a Communist sympathizer even though she denied being a part of the Communist Party. There’s apparently a heavily edited version of the film that was released in the 1950s where all of the allegedly collectivist village life was deleted, and all references to the characters being Russian in any way were removed. That must have made for a very short film indeed.

Oscar Nominations: Best Original Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound Recording, Best Special Effects, Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture