Communists and conservatives in Hollywood joined hands in the middle of WW2 to crank out this ludicrous but nevertheless entertaining salute to the Soviet Union, which was taking a terrible beating from the Nazis at the time. Reds Lillian Hellman and Aaron Copland wrote the script and music (a fine score) while fellow traveler Lewis Milestone directed. Republicans like Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, and Dean Jagger took the leading roles. Only later did the pic come under suspicion as a propaganda piece. While it's too ridiculous and dishonest historically to convert anybody to communism, it has a kind of goofy, rousing energy that makes it, for me, a lot more watchable than many other war melodramas of that time.
Review of The North Star
