Lewis Milestone’s World War II epic “The North Star,” which has circulated in shabby copies and transfers (see embedded clips) since it slipped into the public domain in 1971, is receiving its first authorized release from apparently original materials on Blu-ray and DVD this week from Olive Films. (There are a few scratches blemishes here and there, but it’s still a vast improvement over anything I’ve seen before).
Apparently at the insistence of licensee Paramount Pictures, this historically important film being billed as an “original extended” extra with “Armored Attack!” (1957), a severely edited version that began circulating during the Cold War (and is apparently still covered by copyright) that is of considerable interest in its own right. In fact, I suggested releasing them as a package to Frank Tarzi, Olive’s former head of acquisitions. Full disclosure: much of what follows is reworked from an unused essay commissioned by Tarzi, for which I was paid, before he left Olive to rejoin Kino Lorber.
Nominated for six Oscars, “The North Star” was among a trio of high-profile, lavishly produced pro-Soviet propaganda films produced by Hollywood during World War II. But it was the only one of them rather remarkably re-purposed as anti-Soviet propaganda — as “Armored Attack!” But back in 1942, the Roosevelt Administration was very eager to sway public opinion in favor of our new Soviet allies and their brutal leader Josef Stalin, who many Americans viewed with suspicion because of the Soviet Union’s former non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
Through the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, Hollywood — which at best had taken a mocking attitude toward Stalin’s ruthless regime — was suddenly encouraged to celebrate the Soviets, Stalin, communism and collectivism. Decades later, newly-declassified government documents revealed that these films — including Warner Bros. “Mission to Moscow” and MGM’s (still MIA on DVD) “Song of Russia” — were also aimed at reassuring Stalin himself of American support (lest he endanger the Allied cause with a new German alliance) and, not incidentally, to benefit Tinseltown by reopening the huge Soviet market to their product for the first time since the 1920s.
“The North Star” has the most impressive credentials of these propaganda epics, especially behind the camera.
Dana Andrews sings
Samuel Goldwyn, long one of Hollywood’s most successful independent producer of prestige pictures (with “Wuthering Heights” behind him and “The Best Years of Their Lives” looming in the future) commissioned a script from his prize writer, Oscar-nominated playwright Lillian Hellman (“The Little Foxes”), who had been working on an aborted war-themed documentary about the Soviet Union with the director of those two films, William Wyler — at least until Wyler left for military service.
To direct, Goldwyn brought in Ukrainian-born director Lewis Milestone, an expert at war films whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930) had won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. More to the point, Milestone had just wrapped Warners’ “Edge of Darkness” (1943), a rousing adventure tale of brave Norwegians (led by Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan) resisting fiendish Nazi occupiers. Goldwyn also enlisted one one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, James Wong Howe, who received an Oscar nomination (one of a lifetime total of eight for Howe, who won twice) along with Hellman and famed composer Aaron Copland (the other Oscar nods were for production design, sound and special effects for a film with extremely high production values).
From his own contract list, Goldwyn cast the up-and-coming Dana Andrews (“Laura”) and three-time Oscar winner Walter Brennan (“The Westerner”) as well as his latest discovery, 17-year-old Farley Granger, a high school student making his screen debut in a role spurned by Montgomery Clift. Goldwyn traded Granger’s subsequent services to Fox (for Milestone’s “The Purple Heart”) to obtain Fox’s rising starlet Anne Baxter, top-billed here and later Oscar nominated for the title role in “All About Eve.” And directly from Warners’ “Mission to Moscow,” Goldwyn brought in freelance character actors Walter Huston (later Oscar winner for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and Ann Harding — though this time, Harding would have a much smaller role as the wife of freelancer Dean Jagger.
Former child star Jane Withers, Fox’s B-movie counterpart to Shirley Temple, was signed for her first adult dramatic role. But an even bigger casting coup was Austrian film legend Erich Von Stroheim, who had just revived his World War I specialty of playing despicable Germans for Billy Wilder’s “Five Graves to Cairo,” in which he played Erwin Rommel.
Much of the first half hour of “The North Star” is given over to the peasants in the titular Ukrainian Village — happy collective farmers — dancing and singing ersatz folk songs on which Copland collaborated with lyricist Ira Gershwin.
Freedom fighters’ oath
But on the way home from the festivities, German planes firing machine guns precede the invading army of Russia’s former ally. The peasants begin making preparations — the women, led by Baxter (who would be tortured for her trouble) burn much of the village to the ground while Jagger forms a brigade of freedom fighters. Granger’s character, Army flyer Andrews’ younger brother, has already been blinded in a Nazi atack (as a POW in “The Purple Heart” his tongue would be cut out by his Japanese captors) who kill Withers.
Meanwhile, village doctor Huston is conscripted to assist Nazi surgeon von Stroheim. The normally rigidly Production Code prohibitions against gruesome scenes were often relaxed for World War II propaganda movies. But there are few things in classic era as disturbing as this film’s depiction of blood being forcibly taken from terrified Ukrainian children — some of whom die (we see the hand of one girl desperately clutching the wall as she is dragged into the operating room). Von Stroheim tells Huston he’s disgusted by what he has to do, but Huston won’t let him off the hook. And when the guerillas finally arrive to engage the Germans in a brilliantly-staged action montage — backed by Andrews’ fighter pilot — Huston extracts severe vengeance against Von Stroheim.
“The North Star” opened in November, 1943 in a pair of New York City theaters, unusually playing a reserved-seat engagement at the New Victoria as well as continuous performances across Broadway at the Palace. “I don’t care if this picture doesn’t make a dime,” proud producer Goldwyn was quoted as saying, “just so long as every man, woman and child in American sees it.”
The film got many rave reviews from patriotic critics (Life magazine made it film of the year and called it a “tone poem”) but they were hardly universal. Sent a copy of the film by Goldwyn, press magnate William Randolph Hearst cabled the producer: “You are a very great producer Sam but I think a good American like yourself ought to be producing pro-American propaganda instead of pro-Russian propaganda.” Hearst even had a positive review of “The North Star” that appeared in an early edition of his New York Daily Mirror yanked and replaced with a withering one that labeled the film “pure Bolshevist propaganda” from a screenwriter (Hellman) who was a “partisan pleader for Communist causes.”
But behind the scenes, Hellman griped at the changes to her script that director Milestone commissioned from uncredited script doctor Edward Chodorov, with Goldwyn’s blessing. “You’ve turned it into junk,” she complained, and bought out her long-term contract with the producer. “It will be a huge flop, which it deserves to be,” she predicted — though she didn’t take her name off the picture — or “Armored Attack” for that matter — and didn’t publicly complain until decades later.
Distributed for Goldwyn by RKO Radio Pictures, “The North Star” did indeed lose a lot of money. And it inevitably came up — along with “Mission to Moscow” and “Song of Russia” — when the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating Communist influence in Hollywood after the war was followed by the blacklist era. Right-leaning actor Adolph Menjou, a friendly witness, declared that it should never have been made — “I do not think [it] was a true picture, from what I have been able to learn from reading over 150 books on the subject.” But unlike the more notorious “Mission to Moscow” — rarely seen since its original release — “The North Star” was subjected to an unusual form of political rehabilitation after the picture Goldwyn now called “lousy” became the only one of his films that he sold off (the others are still controlled by his heirs).In 1957, then-owners National Telefilm Associates released to theaters a new, radically-different version to theaters that was called “Armored Attack!”
Half an hour shorter than the original, the fascinating “Armored Attack!” adds new, stridently anti-communist opening narration that relocates the action to what it refers to as “Eastern Europe” — though sharp-eyed viewers will still notice the hammer-and-sickle Soviet insignia on Dana Andrews’ uniform (70 years later, digital effects were used to turn Chinese invaders into North Koreans in the remake of “Red Dawn” to make the film more palatable to the Chinese market) and hear a reference to Kiev. Most of the folk singing is gone, and at least one speech has been completely re-dubbed to remove references to collectivism and communism.
There’s a new epilogue that incorporates newsreel footage showing the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary — a “Red Menace” the narrator pointedly compares to the Nazi invasion of 15 years earlier. It’s this version of “The North Star” that played on television for decades, until the still-impressive original re-emerged in the 1970s. Thanks to Olive Films and Paramount (corporate successor to NTA/Republic) both versions can now be watched in versions that do justice to Howe’s cinematography and provide a unique lesson on how Hollywood turned one kind of propaganda movie into an entirely different one.
‘Forever Female’
Olive continues rolling out a great number of films licensed from Paramount on DVD and Blu-ray — though “Forever Female” (1954) is the last of the batch that was actually released theatrically by the studio (others went out via United Artists, RKO and even MGM). It’s a very funny variation on “All About Eve” written by twin screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein (who shared an Oscar for “Casablanca” with Howard Koch), who were loosely “inspired” by J.M. Barrie’s playlet “Rosalind.”
Ginger Rogers stars as a Broadway legend of a certain age (she was allegedly 42 at the time of the film’s release) who is fond of playing 29-year-olds. When cynical neophyte William Holden writes an appealing play about a 19-year-old woman with an overbearing mother, Rogers and her devoted producer/ex-husband Paul Douglas pressure him to rework it so Rogers can play the daughter as a 29-year-old (there is a sequence of older actresses auditioning for the mother part that’s as touching as it is funny).
The film’s kinder, gentler version of Eve Harrington is played by Pat Crowley, who receives unusual billing at the end as “a Paramount star of the future.” She’s a bit hard to take as a performer in TV commercials who wants to crash Broadway in the daughter role of Holden’s play, which sets up a comic romantic triangle — a quadrangle if you count the always-excellent Douglas, who is still carrying a torch for his ex.
Despite Crowley’s inexperience (she was reportedly a last-minute replacement for Audrey Hepburn, whose American debut was “Roman Holiday” instead), director Irving Rapper wrings lots of laughs out of this backstage story, which includes several scenes shot in a replica of Sardi’s restaurant. Rogers’ final scenes may be the best thing she did in the 1950s, and there’s a great supporting cast that includes James Gleason as Holden’s agent. George Reeves, on hiatus from “The Adventures of Superman,” shows up briefly in a variation on his Clark Kent spectacles (plus a crewcut) as Ginger’s boyfriend du jour — and look fast for Marion Ross of “Happy Days” as the buddy of Crowley, who, like Ross did her best work on TV (she’s best known for the series version of “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies’).
‘Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid’
Many of Olive’s Paramount-owned titles were part of a package of financially unsuccessful independent films that were sold to TV distributors in the mid-1950s after they were repossessed by their financial backer, the Bank of America. One particularly charming one is Irving Pichel’s “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid” (1948) starring the great light comedian William Powell as a man who is taken by his understanding wife (Irene Hervey) on a trip to the Carribean to cheer him up after he turns 50 (Powell was actually 55 at the time).
Powell becomes very cheery indeed, and more than a litle smitten, when he hooks a non-speaking mermaid (Ann Blyth, then 19) during a fishing trip. First he hides her in a bathtub full of bubbles, and then in the outdoor fish pond of the villa where he’s staying as screenwriter-producer Nunnally Johnson cooks up comic complications, all related in flashback to psychiatrist Art Baker. It’s much more innocent, and not quite as funny as the same year’s British mermaid-and-a-married-man picture, “Miranda” with Glynis Johns. But it’s fun watching Powell in one of his last starring roles — hopefully Paramount will also license Powell’s other film in the Bank of America package, “The Senator Was Indiscreet,” for video release.
‘So This is New York’
“Mermaid” holds up better than another B of A repo comedy from 1948 that Olive has just put out on DVD and Blu-ray, Richard Fleischer’s feature directing debut, “So This is New York.” This was the screen debut and sole starring role for Henry Morgan, a sardonic radio comedian who is sometimes mistaken for character actor Harry Morgan (of TV’s “Mash”), who went by Henry early in his screen career and was billed for a time as “Harry (Henry) Morgan.”
Derived from a satirical novel by Ring Lardner and co-written by then-partner Carl Foreman (“High Noon”) for Stanley Kramer’s full-fledged producing debut, it stars Morgan as an employee in a Midwest cigar store whose wife (Virginia Grey) and sister-in-law (Dona Drake) inherit $30,000 apiece in 1919.
Morgan takes a leave and travels to the Big Apple with the ladies to find a husband for the sister-in-law — with Rudy Vallee, Hugh Herbert, Jerome Cowan and Leo Gorcey playing the fortune hunters, and Morgan’s radio sidekick, Arnold Stang, turning up for one hilarious scene. Morgan, who was graylisted and acted in only one other movie (as a DA in the very serious “Murder Inc.” in 1960) and guested as himself (he was a panelist on “To Tell the Truth” for years) in “It Happened to Jane,” is not quite as funny here as his mentor Fred Allen, who made the vastly more hilarious “It’s In the Bag” (1945, also with Vallee), another film in the same package that was previously released by Olive.
Fleischer’s direction does include some innovative use of freeze frames and subtitles, and the film has a cult following — including Martin Scorsese, who booked it into the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival (back when they did revivals). At the time, the New York Times claimed “So This is New York” was so poorly received by critics that its only 1948 theatrical booking in the city was at a theater in Far Rockaway.
‘Caught’
“So This is New York” was sponsored by the ill-fated Enterprise Studio, which included John Garfield as a partner. Olive has just put out — for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray — another cult item from that studio, its last, Max Ophuls’ “Caught” (also 1948). This thriller is highly atmospheric with great camera work, and noir icon Robert Ryan is very good indeed as a manipulative millionaire who more than slightly resembles Howard Hughes.
But the great Barbara Bel Geddes (“Vertigo”) seems too smart for the part as a carhop-turned-model who marries him for his money and spends years regretting it. And top-billed James Mason, in a surprisingly small part, is utterly miscast as a dedicated doctor who tries to save her in Arthur Laurents’ somewhat contrived screenplay, which seems to end abruptly. It’s well worth seeing though, for what Ophuls and Ryan are up to and the spectacular camerawork.
Coming: ‘Distant Drums’
Olive Films will release Charles F. Haas’ noirish “The Big Operator” (1959) with Mickey Rooney and Mel Torme on DVD and Blu-ray Sept. 16. There will be a pair of westerns on Sept. 23: Raoul Walsh’s “Distant Drums” (1951) starring Gary Cooper and Mari Aldon on Sept. 23, and Ray Enright’s “South of St. Louis” (1949) with Joel McCrea and Alexis Smith. Sept. 30 will see the release of Volume 4 of Olive’s “Betty Boop Collecton” containing 13 theatrical shorts by Max and Dave Flesicher released between 1932 and 1938.
Cohen Media Group will put out a Blu-ray upgrade for Fritz Lang’s World War II drama “Hangmen Also Die” (1943) starring Brian Donlevy and Walter Brennan working from a script co-written by Bertolt Brecht. This title from the old Raymond Rohauer library, now controlled by Cohen, was previously available on DVD from licensee Kino.
The Kino Classics line has slated a couple of Jonathan Demme films for Oct. 16: “Last Embrace” (1974) with Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin and “Married to the Mob” (1988) starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modine and Alec Baldwin. Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973), starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe, is coming sometime in November.
The Warner Archive Collection website is releasing four Alan Ladd westerns that were previously available exclusively at Collector’s Choice on Tuesday: “The Big Land” (1957) co-starring Virginia Mao; Delmer Daves’ “Drum Beat” (1954) with Audrey Dalton and Robert D. Meb’s “Guns of the Timberland” (1960) co-starring Jeanne Craig. Another film from Ladd’s production company being released on DVD on that date is Rudolph Mate’s “The Seep Six” (1958) co-starring William Bendix and Joey Bishop.