DVD: www.amazon.com thefilmarchived.blogspot.com The North Star (also known as Armored Attack in the US) is a 1943 war film produced and distributed by RKO Radio 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 by James Wong Howe. The film also marked the debut of Farley Granger. The film is about the resistance of Ukrainian villagers, through guerrilla tactics, against the German invaders of Ukraine. The film was an unabashedly pro-Soviet propaganda film at the height of the war. In the 1950s it was criticised for this reason and it was recut to remove the idealized portrayal of Soviet collective farms at the beginning and to include references to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. In June 1941 Ukrainian villagers are living in peace. As the schools break up for vacation, a group of friends decide to travel to Kiev for a holiday. To their horror they find themselves attacked by German aircraft, part of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Eventually their village itself is occupied by the Nazis. Meanwhile men and women take to the hills to form partisan militias. The full brutality of the Nazis is revealed when a German doctor (Erich von Stroheim) uses the village children as a source of blood for transfusions into wounded German soldiers. Some children lose ... / 6337