Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

THE NORTH STAR (1943)

Even as setup for the tragic events to come, Lillian Hellman’s it-takes-a-Ukrainian-village drama, made at the height of WWII cooperation between Allied Forces & ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin’s Russia lays on the Happy Valley ideal of rural Soviet life, where children grow up straight & the songs are diatonic, impasto thick. Off for a summer hike all the way to Kiev, a group of high school students suddenly find themselves in the thick of the first wave of Nazi invaders by land and air. They need to either get back home or help a truckload of munitions reach partisans in the woods, awaiting their chance to attack. Political melodrama, with speeches embroidered with glorious patriotic drivel, but the drive & horror of wartime emergency comes thru in up-front acting (Anne Baxter, Farley Granger, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston), and in alarming turns from Erich von Stroheim’s civilized blood-draining vampire doctor and Walter Brennan (later an enthusiastic John Bircher) as a cuddly Communist local character. Lots of fodder for later Commie Witch Hunts in here, yet the film was reedited down in ‘57 to become the generic Anti-Communist war film ARMORED ATTACK!


DOUBLE-BILL: Lillian Hellman offered a more characteristic (and personal) response to the war effort in her play WATCH ON THE RHINE, also filmed in 1943, awkwardly directed, but often very effective; while this film’s director Lewis Milestone covered similar events to better fashion in EDGE OF DARKNESS, also out in ‘43. (both covered below)

No comments: