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The North Star (also known as Armored Attack in the US) is a 1943 war film produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. It was directed by Lewis Milestone and written by Lillian Hellman. 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 Ukraine. The film was an unabashedly pro-Soviet propaganda film at the height of the war.
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 1956 Hungarian Uprising.
In June 1941 Ukrainian villagers are living in peace. As the schools break up for vacation, 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
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). 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.
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) 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."
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.
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SANDS OF IWO JIMAby jeffduce55183,639 views
In reality the Ukranian people welcomed the nazi's as liberators and themselves strung up the jews for their part in bringing bolshevism.
In former (and later) Stalin territory the populace was happy with the arrival of the German army unlike in the west, because they got authoritarianism instead of totalitarianism and there was no liberty to lose to begin with.
SloterMFmeyer 3 weeks ago
@zu0832 Yours or mine?
dasUBootVII 1 month ago
@Categorycinque Has anyone ever seen a WWII movie from the Glittering Ghetto that wasn't hokeyer than Hell's Icecapades? ....with the dubious exception of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT with Lew Aires and Noah Beery (1940)
dasUBootVII 1 month ago
Life has its ironies......wasn't it this very same Dana Andrews who played the character "Matt Sovetic" in the "I was a communist for the FBI" series on CBS radio back during the Korean and Cold War 1950s? Strange how America gets duped into loyalties forged in Hell then later gives the appearance of switching them while sacrificing tens of thousands of its own troops for less than nothing as they did in Korea and Nam. America will never learn. Right now the drooling Moron Majority shuns RP.
dasUBootVII 1 month ago
@mearder ??? lol u mad bro
CrysiSwkotor 1 month ago
@dasUBootVII another idiotic statement Mr. Nazi
zu0832 1 month ago
@nszjaszczur you're a complete idiot for saying that
zu0832 1 month ago
jewish propaganda...
nszjaszczur 1 month ago
Music by Aaron Copeland. The theme is a well-known Russian folk song. "I travel the vast World."
tigranvartanovitch 1 month ago
wow
utopdirs 2 months ago