The North Star (1943 film)
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The North Star is a 1943 film produced and distributed by RKO Pictures. It was directed by Lewis Milestone and written by Lillian Hellman. The film starred Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan and Erich von Stroheim. The music was written by Aaron Copland, the lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and the cinematography was done by James Wong Howe
Though picture was a major studio release, it was an unabashedly pro-Soviet propaganda film. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) would later use The North Star as one of the three noted examples of pro-Soviet propaganda films made by Hollywood, the other two pictures being Warner's Mission to Moscow {1943} and MGM's Song of Russia{1944}.
This movie is so filled with official Soviet propaganda about collective farms that the British historian Robert Conquest calls it: "a travesty greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but experienced in this particular matter [collective farm conditions] to a degree requiring at least a minimum of restraint." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, Conquest, page 321, Oxford Press, 1986; see Chapter 17 for detailed information on the efforts of pro-Soviet Westerns to help the regime cover up the true conditions on the collective farms).
The plot of The North Star is about the resistance of the "heroic" villagers, through guerrilla tactics, against the evil German invaders in the Ukraine.
Similar US World War II movies are RKO Radio Pictures'sDays of Glory (1944 film) on Russian Resistance in Tula Oblast and MGM's Dragon Seed (film) on Chinese Resistance to the Japanese occupation.
In point of fact, because of the genocide committed by Stalin in the Ukraine in 1931-32, with a minimum of 5 million murdered (Conquest, ibid.), the Wehrmacht were, at first, greeted as liberators by Ukrainians before the Nazis' own crimes against humanity turned the population against them.
