demaeseneerjean I saw this movie right after the war. I was than 14 and it made a great impression on me especially because the German invasion of our village was not so brutal as shown here. Nevertheless I always remembered the the story even after 60 years (!). As I see it now and after having read a lot about WWII the story seems to be biased by portraying only Germans as heartless killers and war loving people. Wars happen and bring about atrocities from both sides. But wars can bring about much compassion from both the attackers as the attacked. From this viewpoint the rating by the Commission is correct. All nations have committed crimes against humanity in the past yet those perpetrated by the 'own' people are considered less fearful. The movie is wrong in that Germany considered the Ukraine as a possible ally. Rather, the Russians themselves were seen as enemies owing to the immense sufferings (hunger and millions of deaths owing to the famine caused by the forced collectivization of agriculture by the communists. So the brutal attack can have happened in Russia when the invasion started on 06/22/1941. This is not a plea for the Nazi atrocities committed during the War but just a reminder that a nation should beware of using armed forces against other nations. And if so, show compassion to the losers, who mostly did only their duty.

arfdawg-1 The Plot.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.WW2 propaganda with lots of heavy hitters in front AND behind the camera. But it doesn't gel. It's slow and heavy on an American message even though this is supposed to be the Ukraine. (AND BTW, why are they all speaking American?)There is an inordinate amount of filler and rear screen projection. ZZZzzz.I found myself bored beyond belief and wound up waiting for Von Stroheim. Keep waiting. He shows up nearly an hour into this movie and by then, you'll be bailing.

RobertEdwardJ25 Yesterday on TCM I came into the middle of a movie where I immediately recognized one of my favorite actors, Dana Andrews, and recognized the unmistakable voice of Walter Brennan even when his face was covered with the beard of a Slavic Patriarch. Looking them both up along with IMDb on my cell phone internet connection led me to North Star (1943). I followed the movie to its conclusion and discovered that although I found it to be a likely bit of war propaganda, that such rah-rah-whatever-side-the-USA-happens-to-support-at-the-time films probably resonate with me, even when they're sort of corny and propagandistic. Some of the charges made in the movie against the Wehrmacht were so seemingly outrageous that I decided to do further research, and eventually came to your website again and read Varlaam's review and more thoroughly looked at the credits and so forth and discovered that the scriptwriter was - uh oh - Lillian Hellman.Varlaam was correct to point out that when the Germans invaded Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, they were greeted as liberators, indeed I have personally seen film footage of Ukrainian women throwing roses in the paths of German soldiers. This was because the Ukrainians were starving (over 7 million of them by that point), which fact was caused by Soviet Collective Farming. Malcolm Muggeridge of course exposed the Ukrainian starvation, while the New York Times' Walter Duranty covered it up. This then begs the question: why WOULD Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, etc. lend their names to a film of this sort? Moreover, who would write it? The answer is that Lillian Hellman wrote it. Lillian Hellman was such an unrepentant Communist that she actually praised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.The really sad part is that an important feature of the movie, the use of Russian children by the Wehrmacht as human blood banks, appears potentially to be true. Yet there were only two hits on the first page of google hits that are NOT false positives when you type in Nazis used children as blood banks, and only one of those two (the top two) was a serious historical journal article, the other merely a chat board discussion. It's mentioned in the historical article that the Soviets mentioned this charge at Nuremburg, and it's the one charge that got dropped. Is it possible that, given Hellman's reputation, that she was seen as a biased boy crying wolf? Who knows? I'd be curious to know if there are others who, like me, tend to like the really mushy "mainstream of American 'thought'" (or perhaps I should say, 'feelings') movies of the 1940s (perhaps the influence of my parents) but who, having become older and wiser, wonder how much of what they "know" about reality is influenced by films with a fairly biased perspective. The sad part of Hellman's movie is that the most shocking part of her movie may be true, but unfortunately has largely gone into the dustbin of history due to the fact that her perhaps justified charge against the Wehrmacht has been thrown out with the bathwater of her Communist ideology.

Casablanca3784 First off, the entire movie can be viewed online at http://www.archive.org/details/TheNorthStar/Secondly, the film's all about the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine beginning with an all out assault on the SU on 6/22/41 from Lake Ladoga to the Black Sea. But there's a very large misconception inherent in this film. The Germans didn't come into the Ukraine with guns blazing. On the contrary, they tiptoed in knowing they might have a valuable ally in Ukraine which despised Stalin who brought upon it the mass starvation in the '30s.The movie however depicts the German invasion of the Ukraine as a ruthless killing orgy. It's FALSE.Thousands of Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators.In fact, Ukrainian General Vlassov formed an army equipped to fight alongside the Germans.Was the film made to engender liking for the pre-Cold War Soviet Union? You bet.Was it wrong to have supported the S.U. before and during WWII? Absolutely not. Was it wrong to have supported the S.U.after WWII. You betcha if you were an anti-communist and I sure was and STILL AM.However let's keep things in perspective instead of in the realm of Joe McCarthy thinking.Nazi Germany was OUR enemy.The Soviet Union was attacked by our enemy.The SU therefore began killing German soldiers. An enemy of our enemy is our friend. Of course Stalin was a murderous dictator. Just look alone at the millions he starved to death in the Ukraine (no wonder why so many Unrainians welcomed the Germans as liberators).However when compared to the biggest murderous maniac of all time, Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin was a saint."The North Star" was by no means any cinematic miracle. If we look at it from the vantage point of 1943, it comes across very differently than viewing it in 2010. Seeing it '43, inspired Americans to cheer on Russia but in '10,it made me realize how corny it was.No one spoke with either German or Russian accents.The Nazi pigs and Russian peasants and partisans sounded like they had come from Brooklyn. Certainly Erich von Stroheim, a German, could have sounded like the evil doctor who killed children by siphoning their blood serum to wounded German soldiers. The act alone was enough to make us hate that creep but had he added a bit of Deutsch, we'd hate him more. The acting by the big 9, Anne Baxter,Dana Andrews,Walter Huston,Walter Brennan,Ann Harding,Jane Withers,Farley Granger,Erich von Stroheim and Dean Jagger belonged in Ebbets Field. The movie was nominated for 6 Oscars, won 1 however not in the field of "meat and potatoes." Although I did watch the entire film, I feel it was certainly not up to par with good war movies but what the heck, we won the war anyway.