no
longer young
Lillian Hellman (story and screenplay, with added
dialogue by Burt Beck), Lewis Milestone (director) The North Star (revised as Armored
Attack!) / 1943
Lewis Milestone’s 1943 movie The North Star has got to be one of the
strangest films in all of Hollywood. The project began with Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s suggestion to film producer Samuel Goldwyn that he do a film about
America’s Russian ally, particularly given the recent attacks on the Soviet
Union by the Nazis.. Not so coincidentally, Roosevelt’s son, James, was then
president of Goldwyn studios.
Whether or not James helped put further
pressure on Goldwyn is uncertain, but it is apparent that Goldwyn himself was
very keen on the idea, hiring Lillian Hellman to write a story that might
possibly be filmed as a kind of documentary. Hellman particularly wanted to
focus the work on Ukraine, a choice that seems somewhat odd given the fact that
in 1941 Ukrainian nationalists, with the Soviets retreating from the Ukraine in
preparation for battles, declared independence—a struggle that had been
simmering since the Russian takeover of the country. The independence group
(OUN), centered in Lviv, however, sided with the Socialist Nationalist
government of Germany under Hitler, which startled even the Germans, who when
they attacked Russia and Ukraine arrested most of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists, sending many to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, ultimately
killing 80% of their members. Hitler himself ordered that troops be
particularly brutal with women and children involved with the OUN group.
Although Hellman had never been to
Ukraine, she based much of her story and script on experiences she had had in
her previous trip to Russia, where she had visited a collective farm. She
apparently researched extensively.
Goldwyn, meanwhile, hired the experienced
director of All Quiet on the Western
Front, Lewis Milestone, who, along with the studio, signed a notable group
of actors, including Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Ann Harding,
Jane Withers, Anne Baxter, Dean Jagger, Erich von Stroheim, and Farley Granger
(in his first screen role).
On top of that the studio signed the
great American composer Aaron Copland and noted lyricist Ira Gershwin to write
music and lyrics for the film.
Finally, noted cinematographer James Wong
Howe was brought aboard.
In fact, in its uses of sunflowers, rows
of corn, and swelling hills, the set of The
North Star is somewhat closer to Ukraine perhaps than Hellman’s imagined
Russian steppes. But the whole is as many critics of the day, and many more
since are argued, is pure hokum. The very idea of using the character-actor
Walter Brennan as a comrade pig-farmer who becomes a freedom-fighter brings on
the giggles.
Certainly it not surprising that at one
point early in the filming Hellman burst into tears, and later bought her
contract back from Goldwyn, refusing to do more films with him.
Even Brennan, in one of his least overacted
roles, becomes quite convincing, as does Huston as the elderly Dr. Kurin, who
leads his fellow villagers to oust and kill the Germans.
The fascinating quartet of the younger
generation, Kolya and Damian Simonov (Dana Andrews and Farley Granger), Marina
Pavlov (Anne Baxter) and the somewhat comic and yet quite enduring Clavida
Kurin (Jane Withers) begin the movie as school kids on their way to the big
city, Kiev. But very soon encountering the Nazi planes, they admit that they
are no longer young as they grow quickly into heroes in the struggle to bring
guns to the freedom fighters hiding in the forest.
Several scenes—the villagers attempts to
torch their own homes filled with their personal belongings, the intense gun
battles between the youths and German caravans, and the final battle between
the returned freedom fighters and the entrenched Nazi troops—represent the best
of war and adventure cinema genres, with Milestone often showing the scene from
one perspective only to immediately follow it up from another, so that the
audience feels it has a kind of early panoramic vision of the action, creating
not only great tension but revealing an intense horror of war that kills its
victims not once, but twice.
If the film seems to begin, accordingly,
on a slightly loopy soundstage full of eccentric village simpletons, it ends as
a quite serious exploration of just how much people are willing to give up in
order to keep, within, a tiny possibility of hope for a new existence and the
will to create a new society.
Although William Randolph Hearst insisted
that his reviewers describe it simply as “UNADULITERATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA”
(when a positive review slipped out in his New
York Journal-American, Hearst pulled it by the next edition), other critics
reviewed it credibly, and the film received six Academy Award nominations.
Over time, however, critics seem to have
ignored any of the positive qualities I have just enumerated. In part it was
the times itself that changed notions surrounding the film. Over the next
decade, US viewers lost any sense of differentiation between Russia and
Ukraine, and, particularly during the 1950’s McCarthy witch-hunts the director,
writer, producer and actors were forced to face the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (the film have been labele as being one of three
supposedly “Commie”-supporting films, the other two being Mission to Moscow and Song of
Russia). Particularly after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, everyone
involved was forced to back away from the original. In 1957 the film was
severely edited, with long anti-Communist statements added, and released as Armored Attack! Strangely, today, at
least to my taste, the remake—sans
the silly idyll of collectivist living—seems to be more propagandistic than the
original, and, in some vague sense, has more in common with the films of
Dovzhenko than with other American portrayals of war-time survival.
Los Angeles, August 7, 2014
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