Few Hollywood films have gone through as many evolutions and interpretive cycles as North Star. Released in 1943 as part of the industry’s encouragement of the American public’s acceptance of the Soviet Union as a heroic wartime ally, North Star was nominated for six Academy Awards and did quite well at the box office. In 1952, during the HUAC hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood, North Star was cited as an example of how Hollywood Reds had gotten subversive messages onto American screens. In 1957, National Telefilm Associates bought the film. After changing the soundtrack and adding newsreel footage of [the Soviet crushing of] the Hungarian Rebellion of 1956, North Star was re-released as Armoured Attack. The film’s theme was now Communist betrayal of the anti-fascist struggle.

Samuel Goldwyn…chose … the celebrated playwright Lillian Hellman [to write an original script for a “quality picture”]. (…) The Hellman film was budgeted for three million dollars, the most Goldwyn had ever put into a single film. William Wyler was slated to direct, but early on he was replaced by Lewis Milestone, who had been born in Odessa. Music was to be composed by Aaron Copland, whose leftist credentials included many projects for New Masses magazine and membership in the Composers’ Collective. Hellman’s original script centered on a prosperous collective farm in the Ukraine. [When the “North Star” collective is attacked and occupied by the Nazis, the heroic peasants apply the scorched earth policy] and the survivors vow to fight on until total victory over fascism….

No sooner was Hellman’s script in hand than Goldwyn began to make fundamental alterations. … Most devastating to Hellman’s conception was Goldwyn’s notion that the Americans had to be warmed up to the Russkies with some music. This singing, dancing, and storytelling goes on for nearly a third of the film. …. Hellman would forever hold Goldwyn responsible for debasing her script. … She described the film’s opening as an “extended opera bouffe, peopled not by peasants, real and alive, but by musical comedy characters without a thought or care in the world.”…

When National Telefilm Associates bought North Star in 1957, the film was re-edited virtually frame by frame and expunged of any politically distasteful language. Every comrade was excised. One NTA executive lamented, “The only thing we couldn’t take out – much to our regret – was Dana Andrews running around in his Soviet uniform.” (…) [The once pro-Soviet, now anti-Soviet film] was released to theatres in the Mid-west specializing in action pictures and was a box-office suc- cess….

Dan Georgakas, “A Second Look: The Revisionist Releases of North Star”, Cineaste (New York), v.22 n.1, 1 April 1996