“The North Star” is a movie I admire for the effort, patience and talent—all sincere—that went into the making of it; but it is one that I feel is too careful of how it walks and what path it takes. This in spite of there being no shoddiness, that it is a grateful, compassionate tribute to the Russian people, projected cleanly and with that elegance of craftsmanship that Sam Goldwyn manages by obtaining the best material and artists available to satisfy his idea of a well tooled product; that Lillian Hellman wrote the script, the first she has done directly for the movies; Lewis Milestone did the directing, James Wong Howe the photography and Aaron Copland the music.
“North Star” is the name of a Soviet coöperative farm and village on the Bessarabian frontier. Its life is shown during the two peaceful, unsuspecting days before June 20, 1941, and during the next two days when the villagers go through the first horror of the German invasion, lose their village to the Germans and return as guerillas to destroy both. There is a freedom evident in its material; whether it is singing, dancing, going to school or a walking trip of four young Russians to Kiev, it has an unhampered mobility that is free of all paternalism. The Russian life it projects (any part of which could be used to advertise Sunkist oranges) is a fount of gayety and brightness and people who are free of all rancor or selfishness. But the movie does not express the ultimate freedom in which individuality or differences in people are respected—its characters are so undifferentiated (unusual for a Hellman script) that they are not only uninteresting but are difficult to keep apart. Here again coöperative life, or communism, is adolescently denatured. And there is no great figure of fascism presented, to accent, or put a strain on, freedom. It is simply another picture in which the ideas more difficult of expression are evaded by being taken for granted as known already to the audience.
The fault at the heart of the movie, and of almost every other modern Hollywood movie, is in a usurpation by the artist of the spectators’ brains and sensibility, in order to make the action of the film perfectly clear and understandable to them. The producers have carefully removed all the foreign bodies, diluted the idiosyncrasies or left them out altogether, and simplified what is left into slow, rounded, general statements. The food has not only been cooked for you but eaten and digested. There is no shock left, none of that magnetism which picks the spectator up and deposits him inside the story.
This kind of cleaned and plucked movie art, which is to the spectator what a prefabricated house is to the carpenter, is the result of the overomniscience that is the perpetual trap to the director of a medium as encompassing as the motion picture—especially to those who overestimate how much of an encounter can be shown before straining the spectator’s sense of the pace, duration and undeliberate quality that makes the artistic projection of an encounter living rather than merely explained. This turning of the spectator into a receiver rather than a co-worker occurs in the conception itself of the subject matter: the too-fortunate and conscious view that the camera takes of events, so that you feel the artist is merely copying an action he thinks of as already accomplished; the manipulation of characters into patterns of action, so that you feel the ostentation; and the lack of individuality in the texture of the photography, so that you feel it is not expressing the spirit of the idea but merely making a clear reproduction of a reënactment of the idea. The result is that no matter what you are shown—the folk dance, the strategy of the guerilla attack, the school commencement exercises—your feeling is that you are seeing a posed, not a spontaneous, action.
After reducing the characters to saccharine strait-jackets tagged “old man,” “young girl” and “intellectual,” putting starched oratory into their mouths, giving them the latest college-cut looks and refusing them the right to have some sentiment that is native, unpampered and free, there is little that acting can save, and except for certain irregularities presented by Ann Harding and Eric von Stroheim which still interest me, as far as I am concerned, nothing is saved.
Near the end of the picture there occurs one exception to the general tidiness, one which finally scratches your emotions and understanding. The villagers have successfully carried through their counter-attack, and the Russian surgeon faces the Nazi surgeon, the proud liberal who has put up with Nazism and makes such statements as, “I do not like much what I have done for the past nine years.” The Russian answers, “I have heard about men like you. The civilized men who are sorry. Men who do the work of fascists and pretend to themselves they are better than those for whom they work. It is men like you who have sold your people to men like Hitler.” And the Russian shoots this Nazi. Whatever has been lost by making this picture’s only important Nazi a “civilized man,” it is the only moment in the picture when the uneasy and the unconventional has been dared—it is what you entered the picture to find. The fault of “The North Star” is a failure of the kind of nerve that produced this incident and the inability to attach the little that it does say to the emotions of the spectator.
November 8, 1943