The North Star (1943) is a war drama on a Ukrainian village life, whose idyllic existence is destroyed by the Nazi invasion and ordinary citizens, such as schoolchildren, doctors, and peasants, are made to struggle against the forces as partisans. The North Star film is now freely available and in the public domain as a free classic film and public domain film and commonly re-released as Armored Attack.
Movie Background Table
Movie Cast Table
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Anne Baxter | Marina Pavlov |
| Dana Andrews | Kolya Simonov |
| Walter Huston | Dr. Pavel Kurin |
| Walter Brennan | Karp |
| Ann Harding | Sophia Pavlov |
| Jane Withers | Clavdia Kurin |
| 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 Pavlov |
| Esther Dale | Anna Kurin |
| Ruth Nelson | Nadya Simonov |
| Paul Guilfoyle | Iakin |
| Martin Kosleck | Dr. Richter |
| Tonio Selwart | German Captain |
| Peter Pohlenz | German Lieutenant |
Full Plot Summary
It is peaceful and happy in a Ukrainian village of North Star in June 1941. It is now the end of the school year. Teenagers Marina Pavlov, Kolya and Damian Simonov, Clavdia Kurin and their younger friend Grisha discuss a walking tour to Kiev with great excitement. Their families, led by a farmer, Boris Simonov, village leader, Rodion Pavlov, the Dr. Kurin, and the parents of Marina reside on a successful collective farm and are looking into the future cautiously optimistically.
The friends are taken by surprise when the carefree hiking trip is interrupted on the road to Kiev. The opening wave of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union occurs during the strafing of the German dive bombers through the countryside, where the fields and the roads are attacked. Young people are jumping to protect themselves, the landscape is shredded into pieces by explosions; their holiday disappears within a second and the youngsters have to face the reality that the war is knocking at their door.
In North Star, the broadcast is crackling with the news that Germany has struck and the USSR is officially at war. Rodion brings together the villagers on the square. He informs them that the men need to go to build guerrilla bands in the woods and mountains, but the women, children, and the elderly need to remain only to burn their homes and farms so that the Germans could not use them. It is an ugly speech, but the villagers concur: they would rather burn the ashes than allow the invaders to take advantage of their industry.
Boris goes away to retrieve weapons and ammunition to the future partisans through an army depot close by. His truck is hit by German planes on his return and abandons him drowning in an area where his sons Kolya and Damian, Marina, Clavdia, Grisha and the old peasant Karp have sought shelter. Boris, injured fatally, directs his sons to send out the munitions to the guerrillas or the village would be lost. Kolya, having buried his father, assists in loading the guns on wagons after which he takes off to rejoin his air regiment and the rest start their long and hazardous journey home carrying the ammunition.
Meanwhile, a scout on horseback gallops back to North Star to alert about the onrushing column of Germans. The villagers pulled their houses and barns ablaze hoping to give their enemies no hiding place. Soon German soldiers get into the village on fire. In order to prevent the destruction, they shoot several villagers in view of others, and then drag the rest of the population in where they interrogate them about Rodion and the guerrillas. The lack of talk encourages torture by the occupiers.
Doctor Kurin, the entire village doctor, is horrified upon witnessing Sophia Pavlov, whipped before the eyes of her daughter Marina, and small Olga. He turns to the senior German medical officer, Colonel von Harden, in hope that one of the doctors could possess some decency. Von Harden bitterly responds that the unseemly means are a German policy, and must be practiced.
In a short time, the profession displays something even worse. The Germans establish a military hospital and start kidnapping children of the villages to treat them. Von Harden, and a fellow physician, Richter, utilize the children as blood donors to the wounded German soldiers- extracting so much blood that some of the children become feeble and even die. Parents stand by and see their sons and daughters being drained to make enemy troops stay alive.
In rural setting, Kolya who has become an airman carries out several bombing missions. His fourth trip involves flying with a novice pilot whose plane is shot when they are strafing a German armored column. The pilot and the co-pilot are killed and as Kolya hauls the corpses to the side, he on purpose crashes the crippled plane into the tank line killing himself in the process to hold back the invasion.
In the meantime, the team of hikers carrying the ammunition attempts to find a means to reenter North Star. The sole avenue passes through a main road that is in use by German transports. Damian offers to make a distraction in order to get the wagons across. Clavdia, who has been afraid and indecisive since the bombing, trails him without his knowledge so that she can demonstrate her bravery. They stop the convoy sufficiently that Marina, Karp and the rest can run the gun carts to the other end of the road. The Germans start shooting when Clavdia is killed and Damian is struck blind by a grenade and recovers.
Marina and Karp abandon the wagons to find their friends, and finally find Damian, devastated by the death of Clavdia- and his own blindness. The anger against what the Germans have done, the air raids, the blood-drainings of children, is all frenzied among the guerrillas. They conclude that they cannot afford to wait any longer until they get the weapons; they must go out with what they have.
Rodion takes a group of partisans into North star during the dark. They sneak into a warehouse where barrels of gasoline have been kept and roll them into the river next to it and saturate the water with gasoline. Then they set the stream ablaze with grenades and sheets of fire run in the village and into the German lines. Simultaneously, the guerrillas, shouldered by mounted troops, come down the hills and carry improvised arms, and the ammunition wagons eventually arrive at the town, enabling the combatants to get into full weight.
During the mayhem, Dr. Kurin meets von Harden in the hospital accusing him of being a person who disregards all the virtues of the medical profession by making children disposable commodities. He informs the German that he is worse than the fanatics Nazis since he has decided to utilize his capabilities in their service. Kurin then shoots von Harden and the horrors of blood transfusion are stopped.
When the battle is fierce, villagers and partisans stand up to fight jointly to chase the Germans away, or at least render occupation too expensive to be maintained. In the final scenes of the film the survivors promise to carry on with the fight. There is one young woman, commonly Marina, who is looking into the future and announces that they will create a free world where everyone will be once the invaders have been eliminated.
Genre and Key Themes
The North Star is a war and propaganda film, produced during the zenith of the World War II at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies.
Major themes include:
Resistance and sacrifice
The fact that the village was transformed into a guerrilla base when it was a quiet farm village highlights the role of ordinary people who can turn into warriors in case of their homes and children are at stake.
Atrocity and moral outrage
The child blood-transfusion scenes, with the cold German doctor Erich von Stroheim are intended to represent Nazi brutality as well as evoke horror and anger.
Idealized collectivism
Life in North Star prior to the invasion has been introduced in accordance with official Soviet propaganda regarding blissful, contemporary groupings-farms- a depiction that would subsequently be attacked by historians and HUAC as naive and politically biased.
Medical ethics in wartime
The conflict between Dr. Kurin and Dr. von Harden puts the problem whether it is the obligation of a doctor to human life as a whole or to the war machine of his side.
The North Star (1943) Full Movie Watch and Download
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🏛️ See Also
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Sabotage (1936) – Alfred Hitchcock London Terror Thriller | Free Public Domain Full Movie
Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1946) – Mickey Rooney Postwar College Romance | Free Public Domain Full Movie
Movie Review
The North Star 1943 film can be seen nowadays as a great anti-Nazi drama, as well as a blatant pro-Soviet war drama propaganda. William Cameron Menzies, Production design, Lewis Milestone, who has already directed All Quiet on the Western Front, supplies a powerful visual impression of what is going on with James Wong Howe providing the photography and William Cameron Menzies providing the production design, creating an almost epic impression of the village, hills, and battle scenes.
The cast is excellent. Marina, in which Anne Baxter plays the title role, is an emotionally centered hero, and Kolya, the part played by Dana Andrews, and Damian, the part played by Farley Granger, are two options of losing their lives, one becoming a fighter pilot, the other a freshly blind young partisan. The moral aspect of the film is provided by Walter Huston, Dr. Kurin, and Walter Brennan, Karp: Huston, the sensitive doctor who must take a gun and Brennan, the rough, obstinate peasant whose courage is increasing with each defeat. As Dr. von Harden, Erich von Stroheim is chilling with his cold cruelty.
The score by Aaron Copland, with its folk-based themes and swelling battle signals, introduces the emotional punctuation, but does not overpower the plot, and the editing of the movie makes the different strands of the story, hikers, village, partisans, hospital, all come together in a cohesive way. The consequence is usually wringing, particularly in the aerial assault, the burning-village scene, and the last guerrilla assault.
The North Star has however received a lot of criticism too. Following the war, it was listed by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities as a good example of Hollywood pro-Soviet work, together with the films, Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia, due to its idealization of the collective farm enterprise and the heroism of the Soviet peasant. Robert Conquest and others have pointed out the degree to which it is similar to official Soviet propaganda of the era.
To contemporary audiences, that is to watch the film with a certain historical background. Being a narration, it is an effective suspenseful and poignant history of villagers fighting against invasion. History As history, it omits the gloomier facts of Stalinist Ukraine. Nevertheless, being an open source and free classic film and a public domain film, The North Star does not fail to impress in the way that Hollywood mixed art with politics and propaganda during World War II.
Movie Tags
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