The North Star (1943)

Calificación de los usuarios:

6.1/10   

Director:

Lewis Milestone

Escritores:

Lillian Hellman (story)
Lillian Hellman (screenplay)

Fecha de Lanzamiento:

3 marzo 1945 (Sweden)

Género:

Drama | Guerra

Frase comercial:

A rolling wall of hell that couldn't be stopped... A handful of men who had to stop it!

Plot:

A Ukrainian village must suddenly contend with the Nazi invasion of June 1941.

Plot Keywords:

Nazi | Blood Transfusion | Walking | Soviet Union | Guerrilla Warfare

Premios:

Nominated for 6 Oscars.

Comentarios de los usuarios:

Clean old peasant agitprop

Reparto

Anne Baxter	...	Marina Pavlova
Dana Andrews	...	Kolya Simonov
Walter Huston	...	Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin
Walter Brennan	...	Karp
Ann Harding	...	Sophia Pavlova
Jane Withers	...	Clavdia Kurina
Farley Granger	...	Damian Simonov
Erich von Stroheim	...	Dr. von Harden
Dean Jagger	...	Rodion Pavlov
Eric Roberts	...	Grisha Kurin
Carl Benton Reid	...	Boris Stepanich Simonov
Ann Carter	...	Olga Pavlova
Esther Dale	...	Anna
Ruth Nelson	...	Nadya Simonova
Paul Guilfoyle	...	Iakin

También conocida como:

Armored Attack (USA) (recut version)
La estrella del Norte (Spain) [es]

Duración:

108 min

País:

USA

Idioma:

Inglés | Alemán | Ruso

Color:

Negro y Blanco

Relación de Aspecto:

1.37 : 1

Sonido:

Mono

Clasificación:

Australia:G | Sweden:15

Compañía:

Samuel Goldwyn Company, The

Trivialidades:

Film debut of Farley Granger.

Citas:

Iakin, bearded schoolmaster: It is not my custom to start your vacation with a lecture, but this is the summer of 1941 - a solemn time. No one of knows what will happen. I don't have to remind you that we are people with a noble history. You are expected to carry on that history with complete devotion and self-sacrifice. I think you'll do that. And now, have a happy summer.

Clean old peasant agitprop

In the early 1960's, when "The North Star" was being syndicated to local television stations as part of their late-show fodder, the film was re-cut and distributed under the title "Armored Attack." This version featured an apologetic introduction by a grim off-screen narrator, explaining that despite the fact the movie's characters were from the same nation, the Soviet Union, that had recently brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962, Russians were, at one time, America's allies in a war against a common foe--Fascism. And, thus, the rationalization of a film that actually dared to picture the agrarian population of a southern Socialist Republic (Ukraine) as humane but intolerant of the tyranny of an occupying enemy, Nazi Germany.

Thankfully, Lewis Milestone's World War II-era classic has been re-released in its original form, minus the aforementioned preparatory introduction. I don't know if that says anything significant about the political enlightenment of contemporary American film-viewers as opposed to those of forty years earlier, but "The North Star" is obviously propaganda, yet clearly more anti-Nazi than pro-Communist. And like the politics of Orwell, screenwriter Lillian Hellman's sentiments did lean toward the Left; but she, like Orwell, hated tyranny, no matter from what extreme end of the political spectrum, Left or Right, that authoritarianism reared its ugly rhetoric.

Much has been made of the pathetic operetta that dominates the first half-hour of the film by other posters to this site, so I'll dispense with any more mention of that here. Suffice it to say that from the first scene of warfare--a merciless daytime bombardment of civilians on a quiet Ukrainian country road--the film gathers emotional strength. And when Anne Baxter, as a teen-ager schoolgirl, gazes for the first time upon the horrific vision of her school chums, now dead as the result of mechanized warfare, she states evenly, "We're not young anymore." And as the rest of the movie demonstrates, she means it. One of the film's key sequences, wherein Russian partisans astride horses attempt to take back their village in a clever, heroic manner from the better-equipped Germans, gives director Milestone an opportunity to reprise his long tracking shots, used to better effect in the earlier "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930).

When Samuel Goldwyn produced a film like "The North Star," he pulled out all the stops. Here, he hired James Wong Howe to photograph and William Cameron Menzies to design the production. The cast, besides Baxter, includes Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Walter Huston, and, as the Nazi You Love to Hate, the legendary Erich von Stroheim, as a German military doctor who compromises his humanity and professional oath through medical experimentation. Supplies of blood for the German wounded on the front line have dried up, so Dr. Von Stroheim has the children of the village rounded up and brought to the local school, where he draws quantities of blood from them--so much so, that a few of the kids die shortly after the process. Dramatically, it certainly beats visions of the Hun boiling Belgian babies in oil.