THE NORTH STAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 284, 1 December 1944, Page 22

THE NORTH STAR

(Goldwyn-R.K.O.)

‘THIs is Sam Goldwyn’s "tribute to Russia." We have already had M-G-M’s Song of Russia, Warners’ Mission to Moscow, and R.K.O.’s Days of

Glory. That leaves only Paramount, Universal, Columbia, Fox, and United Artists to fall into line, But patience! They'll be coming. Sam Goldwyn has gone all out here to combine his "tribute" with a thoroughly lurid atrocity story about Nazi bestiality in a small Soviet border village which feels the first full impact of German invasion in 1941. But the trouble about atrocity stories is that when they are too atrocious we don’t believe them: we remember what happened in the last war, and it may of course be argued .that the Axis nations know this and exploit it, However, I doubt if this valuable critical check on atrocity-mongering extends to the same extent to the cinema as it does to the printed word. At any rate, Hollywood, which has been _ growing increasingly unrestrained in its propaganda, has lately lifted the lid right off. My own opinion of a film like The North Star, quite apart from the fact that piling on the agony is always bad art, is that it is not only unnecessarily embittering.the present but is also poisoning the future. But such a Jong-term view does not appeal to the average film producer; anything goes so long as he ¢an get away with it, and so long as it is likely to make money at the box-office. It doesn’t do to forget that the profit-motive is usually pretty well mixed up with patriotism in Hollywood. So in The North Star Sam Goldwyn not only breaks a Russian woman’s right arm and leg as a Nazi matter of course, and bleeds small children to death, but he also expounds the theory that those Germans who dislike and despise the Nazis are really much worse than the (continued on next page)

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Nazis themselves if they obey their orders while disagreeing with them in principle. This seems to me a pernicious and dangerous doctrine, since the logical outcome, if it were generally adopted, would be the destruction of almost every living German. But it is a doctrine that comes very glibly off the lips of Walter Huston, as the Russian doctor in the film, when he shoots down the German doctor (Erich von Stroheim) because the latter has been forced, by commands from higher up, to do something which as an individual he abominates, In any case, ticklish issues of political and moral responsibility such as this need much more skilful handling than they receive in The North Star, and this in spite of the fact that the film was written by Lillian Hellman and directed by Lewis Milestone. Some of the acting is very good, some is very bad; some of the direction shows imagination, and at other times it is merely crude. And Hollywood keeps on getting in the way. The Soviet village which we see at peace is too often reminiscent of musical-comedy or a Middle-West rural idyll to be thoroughly convincing, and when we see it at war, it too often recalls a | cowboys-and-Injuns thriller. After all, where there is no restraint there cannot be much sincerity.