Skip the first half of rural fun and games. Substitute Hungarians v Russians, or Armenians v Turks, or any other convenient pair of victims and aggressors for Ukrainians v Germans. Then settle down to enjoy a well-acted, well-directed, gripping and moving 100% fictional story. The narrative unwinds in a manner far superior to patriotic junk like Saving Private Ryan. The trajectory of the one is curiously the reverse of the other. SPR starts dramatically, but slowly stutters to a bathetic finale. NS starts boringly, but accelerates towards a most compelling end. On balance, SPR is pure and painful garbage. Making allowances for its date, this isn't.I didn't pick up what North Star stands for.. Was that the name of the village ? Odd name, if so. Nevertheless I was well entertained by this film. It stands the test.

This is a really good example of a Hollywood propaganda film based on falsehoods about WW II. Set in Ukraine in 1941. The movie was released in the US in 1943. According to this movie, Ukrainians were a cheerful happy people serving the state before the evil Nazis show up to liberate them from Bolshevism. Nazi planes attacked citizens in horse drawn carriages and even children running in the street. One of the funniest scenes to me is Ukrainians burning down their own homes and the Nazis putting out the fires. There is a chain smoking colonel (it was illegal for a German in uniform to smoke in public and smoking was strongly discouraged even in private). Completely draining the blood from Ukrainian children to use in blood transfusions (Germans would not have used blood from non-Germans in transfusions to Germans. It was viewed as a defilement of the blood.) Here is some real history.The director of this movie, Lewis Milestone was a Jew born in Russia as Lev Milstein. The writer, Lillian Hellman was Jewish and black-listed in the 1950's for being a communist. Lillian's 2nd husband, Dashiell Hammett was also black-listed as a communist and imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to given information to the court concerning the funding of men that wanted to overthrow the US by force and violence.The Ukrainians struggled for independence in 1917 after the Bolsheviks killed the Tsar and seized Russia. Stalin killed 7 million Ukrainians in 1928-29 with a man-made famine called Holodomor. The truth is many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis and saw them as their liberators. Germans were never at war against Ukrainians or even Russians despite WW II being called in Russia as "the Great Patriotic War." The Great Patriotic War is Soviet propaganda which is still repeated today. The Germans were at war against Bolshevism (which today would be called globalism/Cultural Marxism/International banking). There were also many Russians who refused to fight for Stalin. Refusing to fight would have got you shot or sent to the gulags. Thus, during just the first few months of the German advance towards Moscow 650,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner. Says a lot when so many surrender to the Germans rather than die for Stalin. The Waffen SS, on the other hand, would fight to the death.It was in 1942 that the Soviet Union's top propagandist, a Jew named Ilya Ehrenburg started a hate program against Germans. It was Ilya Ehrenburg that first made the claim that 6 million Jews had died in Nazi gas chambers. In a leaflet called "Kill" he wrote: "The Germans are not human beings. From now on, the word 'German' is the most horrible curse. From now on, the word 'German' strikes us to the quick. We have nothing to discuss. We will not get excited. We will kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day ... If you cannot kill a German with a bullet, then kill him with your bayonet. If your part of the front is quiet and there is no fighting, then kill a German in the meantime ... If you have already killed a German, then kill another one - there is nothing more amusing to us than a heap of German corpses. Don't count the days, don't count the kilometers. Count only one thing: the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the Germans! ... - Kill the Germans! Kill!"

My enemy's enemy may not always be my friend, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the United States government decided, on the basis of the "my enemy's enemy" principle, to hail Joseph Stalin as a trusted ally and brother-in-arms. The effects of this were soon felt in Hollywood. Tinseltown had long had its own colony of Communist sympathisers, but owing to the disdain for Communism felt both by film moguls and by the great majority of the wider American population they had never had much opportunity to use the cinema to make propaganda for their cause. Even a film like "Blockade", written by the avowed Communist John Howard Lawson about the Spanish Civil War, is so confused in its politics that it is difficult to tell whether it is pro-Republican or pro-Franco. The US-Soviet alliance, however, allowed Uncle Joe's amen corner to come out in their true colours with the full blessing of the American authorities. "The North Star ", therefore is that rare beast, a Soviet propaganda film made in the USA. ("Mission to Moscow" and "Song of Russia" from around the same period are other examples). The script was written by another Communist sympathiser, Lillian Hellman, and the film was directed by Lewis Milestone, best known for the anti-war epic "All Quiet on the Western Front", but who showed here that he could also turn his hand to pro-war epics. The story tells of a Soviet village which is overrun by the Nazi invaders but whose inhabitants fight back through guerrilla tactics. The opening scenes show a most idealised vision of the life back in the USSR. Although there are a few modern touches such as tractors, telegraph poles and Red Army uniforms, just to let us know that it is 1941 and not 1812, the overall impression is of a sort of timeless Ye Olde Merrie Russia, a place of thatched cottages inhabited by happy smiling peasants, of horse-drawn carts, of pretty girls in traditional folk-costumes with flowers in their hair, of handsome young men singing and accompanying themselves on the balalaika. Actually, the village of North Star is not in Russia proper at all but in the Ukraine. Indeed, given that the village is captured by the Germans in the first few hours of Operation Barbarossa, it is presumably in the westernmost part of the Ukraine- that is to say in territory which was Polish until 1939 and only became Soviet as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Needless to say, that notorious piece of double-dealing and the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 are not mentioned anywhere in this film. There are also a few other things which Ms Hellmann neglects to mention:-1. Communism. The words "Communist" and "Communism" are never heard. The word "Socialist" only appears twice, on both occasion as part of the formula "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". 2. Stalin. Old Uncle Joe is conspicuous by his absence. 3. The forced collectivisation of Soviet farmland in the early thirties and the ensuing famine, or Holodomor, which killed several million Ukrainians. The film gives the impression that the peasants still own their own land. Of course, if the people of North Star were still under Polish rule at this period they would have been spared this ordeal, but would have been well aware of what was happening on the other side of the border. 4. The Great Purges of the late thirties. 5. The fact that in many parts of the western Soviet Union- especially those parts not inhabited by ethnic Russians- the German invaders were initially actually welcomed as liberators from Stalinist rule. The film stars some well-known actors- Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan and Farley Granger, whose first film this was. (Huston achieved the unenviable double of appearing both in this film and in "Mission to Moscow"). It does not, however, contain any acting of note. None of the characters are shown as rounded individuals, but are simply personifications of Absolute Good (Soviets) or Absolute Evil. (Germans).The following year, Andrews and Granger were again to act together in a propaganda film, "The Purple Heart" about the war in the Pacific. This latter film has been much criticised for its allegedly racist treatment of Japanese characters, but "The North Star" has not received similar criticism for its equally racist treatment of the Germans. It was, of course, criticised during the Cold War period, but this criticism centred upon its whitewashing of Communist rule in the USSR and not upon its stereotypical portrayal of the Germans as Beastly Huns. It would seem that in Hollywood it is OK to be racist about certain races but not others. Particularly offensive is the portrayal of the German doctor played by Erich von Stroheim who is sceptical about Nazism but is just as willing to commit acts of brutality as any Nazi. (His surname is von Harden- presumably chosen for its closeness to the English word "hard"). The implication is that all Germans- not just the Nazi leadership- are evil. Not all wartime propaganda films were bad. Some were very good pieces of film-making and one or two, such as "Casablanca" or "Went the Day Well?" deserve the label "great". "The North Star" is not a film of this nature. It is a lying, bigoted piece of propaganda, every bit as dishonest as the sort of films which might have been shown in Stalin's own cinemas. Watching it I realised what Mary McCarthy meant when she said of Hellmann that "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'". 2/10

I am amazed by the intensity of some of the comments.The 1943 movie North Star celebrated Stalin's dictatorship over Ukrania, presenting the joys of colectivisation on the humble peasants among whom was the veteran actor Walter Brennan who otherwise played stereotyped American personages. Where the joys of collectivization were simply leftist rot and John Wayne is said to have hated this movie, the movie correctly presents the intensity with which the Russians fought to expel the German invaders. Most German veterans of the Great Patriotic War note that Russians fought on when British or French would have stacked arms and sat by the roadside watching panzers drive by.The movie of course does not present the other side of the coin. Ukrania was a province where Stalin had his greatest problem. Resentment flared intensely against the Soviet regime particularly in the rural areas which retained their allegiance to the Church and which resented collectivization. Many Ukranians defected to the German cause.This film of course was shot in 1942 in the heat of the war. I hardly would have deemed it sane to have made a movie about citizens of an allied country who had defected to the enemy.I do recall that this film went to TV's Million Dollar Movie in the 1950s substantially edited and presented as a German invasion of Hungary and ended with a voice over reference to the Hungarian revolt in 1956.