Customer Reviews

Hollywood Classics Collectors Edition - North Star [VHS]

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Samuel Goldwyn's THE NORTH STAR is a prestigiously mounted film about a small village in the Ukraine attacked by the Nazis during the Barbarossa campaign during WWII. The film demonstrates how the men and women of our ally Russia worked as a cohesive force to fight off the Germans. An impressive cast includes Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter, Dean Jagger, Farley Granger, Erich von Stroheim, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan and Jane Withers. The list of other filmmakers is also very impressive. They include director Lewis Milestone, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe and distinguished composer Aaron Copland and producer William Cameron Menzies. That's quite a list. Aaron Copland, James Wong Howe and Lillian Hellman were all nominated for the Academy Award for their work on this film. This film puts the Russians in a good light as romantic combatants meeting the brutal and barbaric Germans in this skillfully constructed piece of propaganda. It is an interesting to see the American perception of the Soviets from this film made during WWII. It does entertain on several levels.

Even if you aren't a closet Stalinist, it's still wooden, strident propaganda, and poorly executed. Although it manages to be even more repulsive than this, Mission to Moscow (Warner's contribution at the behest of FDR) is a better example of morbidly interesting propaganda.

North Star presents the Soviet land of Oz, complete with dancing, well-fed, collectivized peasants (you half expect to see Shirley Jones make an appearance). Worth seeing -- although not buying -- if you want to see the Big Lie in action. And it's a whoppin' Big Lie too.

This WWII era film is about the most fraudulent picture of Stalin's Russia to ever come out of Hollywood. When you consider the volume of negative information that has come out of the former Soviet Union, this picture is surrealistic in it's bucolic picture of Soviet life on the verge of WWII. In point of fact, the peasants in the Ukraine welcomed the German Army with flowers. They had been so brutalized by Stalin that they actually thought (for about five minutes) that they were being liberated. Then the Germans turned out to be as brutal as the Bolshevics. It is hard to believe that the Cold War began just three years after this film was made. If you see it or buy it, view it as a double feature with "Enemy at the Gates", a recently made film that is extremely close to the truth. No wonder McCarthy investigated Hollywood.