“The U.S. government put considerable pressure on Hollywood during World War II to produce films that would create sympathy for our allies in the Soviet Union in their struggle against the invading Nazis. The studio executives--good capitalists all--were not eager to glorify a Communist country, but they grumbled and went along. MGM's contribution was a musical, of all things, called Song of Russia; but most of these films were closer in spirit to The North Star, which portrayed the resistance of the occupants of a Ukrainian collective farm in heroic terms that Stalin himself would have applauded. Lillian Hellman's script occasionally hinted at something like normal human complexity underneath the cardboard nobility of her embattled peasants, and even included a strongly written part for Erich von Stroheim as a ‘good' German, a doctor, corrupted in spite of himself by his Nazi colleagues. More importantly, Lewis Milestone demonstrated that the director of All Quiet on the Western Front had not forgotten how to stage a battle scene.
“The North Star could be enjoyed just as an exciting war movie, with the result that it became the only one of the Hollywood pro-Soviet films to be reissued after the war. The new version, called Armored Attack, was heavily edited to remove any suspicion of Communist propaganda: the locale was changed to a village in an unspecified Eastern European country, and newsreel footage of the 1956 Hungarian uprising was added to make the point that the film's farmers had merely exchanged their German oppressors for Russian troops. Sequences from the reissue will be run after The North Star to illustrate the difference between the two versions.” Charles Hopkins