“North Star” was a Hollywood box-office success, released in 1943, when the US and the USSR were allies in fighting Nazi Germany.
The film produced by Samuel Goldwyn, directed by Lewis Milestone featuring Ann Baxter and Dana Andrews, acknowledges the Soviet Union’s courageous resistance against Nazi Germany. It puts forth a pro-Soviet perspective, focussing on the heroic struggle of Communist partisans in a Ukrainian village fighting against Germany’s Wehrmacht in liaison with the Soviet Union’s Red Army.
Three years later, the Cold War was launched by the Truman administration.
About-turn. Hollywood becomes a relentless instrument of propaganda directed against America’s former ally, portraying Communism and the Soviet Union as a threat to Western democracy.
Hollywood spy movies in the 1950s (with the CIA fighting Communist KGB agents) broadly complied with Washington’s anti-communist rhetoric, culminating with the McCarthy era and the present post-Cold war propaganda Russia-Gate narrative directed against the Kremlin.
The final segment of “North Star” is a powerful message of peace and solidarity. Read it carefully.
“All people will learn and come to see that wars do not have to be.
We will make this the last war.
We will make a Free World for all men.
The Earth belongs to us, the people, if we fight for it. And we will fight for it”
(Anne Baxter as Marina Pavlova in North Star, 1943, 1.44′)
Michel Chossudovsky, October 20, 2017, November 13, 2022
***
In a peaceful Ukrainian village, the school year is just ending in June 1941. Five young friends set out for a walking trip to Kiev, but their travels are brutally interrupted when they are suddenly attacked by German planes, in the first wave of the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union. When the village itself is attacked and occupied, most of the men flee to the hills to form a guerrilla unit. The others resist the Nazis as well as possible, but soon the village is placed under the command of a Nazi doctor who begins using the town’s children as a source of constant blood transfusions for wounded German soldiers. Meanwhile, the small group of young persons tries desperately to take a supply of firearms to the guerrillas.
Also Known As: Armored Attack
Director: Lewis Milestone
Writers: Lillian Hellman (original story and screenplay), Burt Beck (additional dialogue in new edition)
Stars:
Anne Baxter as Marina Pavlov
Dana Andrews as Kolya Simonov
Walter Huston as Dr. Kurin
Walter Brennan as Karp
Ann Harding as Sophia Pavlov
Jane Withers as Clavdia Kurin
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