This is a grim war drama made extremely realistic, while at the same time it's a great musical film, mainly because of the great score by Aaron Copland, skilfully suiting the music to the occurring scenes. The first half hour is a delightfully charming musical following the life of the Ukrainian villagers to their parties and feasts of spring and summer, and the music is very convincingly Ukrainian and original - you want to join the dancing parties. Then comes the war as the most drastic possible change into a nightmare without end, involving the deaths of many of the previously happy and joyous party people. Farley Granger, Anne Baxter and Dana Andrews are all very young here and a joy to behold as very convincing and vital Ukrainians, and at least there are a few survivors. The leading German is Erich von Stroheim, who also is an operating surgeon, and his final argument with Walter Huston as the Ukrainian doctor is not quite as convincing as the rest of the film. The cinematography is terrific, you get a very strong impression of the actual nature of the war brought upon many millions of innocent people by the meaningless aggression of the German dictatorship, and if there are minor flaws and outdated details, like some propaganda stuff, you will forget it as negligeable: the overwhelmingly strong impression of the film as a realistic rendering of the German invasion of Russia and Ukraione 22nd June 1941 will remain, as this film will remain invaluable.

The start of this movie shows a Ukranian village, happy and peaceful. Five youths, Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter, Farley Granger, Jane Withers, and Eric Roberts, go out on a picnic, but before they make it back home, their lives are disrupted by a Nazi invasion. Bombs, soldiers, and gunshots make them transition from innocence to realism, and by the end of the film, their lovely little world isn't the same.

In the first, very lengthy section of the film, the merry-making is just too merry. How many Ukranian songs and group dances do we have to sit through? One more, and then another, and then just one more. Then, when the kids go out on their harmless outing, it isn't really harmless. Jane Withers is in love with Dana Andrews, but he continually insults her appearance and intelligence. Is this courtship supposed to be cute? The transition from peace to war feels intentionally dramatic, as if screenwriter Lillian Hellman had a smug smile on her face as she said the words she believed no one had ever said before: "War is bad."

If all war movies were like The North Star, no one would ever go to see them and the genre would fade away. Thankfully, not all of them are this bad. I still haven't recovered my jaw from the ground after learning it was nominated for six Academy Awards.

This film has all the right ingredients; good production values, good actors and a well-known writer and director. It is missing one thing; believablity. A vierer has to believe the story is viable for the story to have any positive effect on the viewer. This story does not seem too realistic. A commune where everyone has plenty of food, is well-dressed and has every member of the family fully contented seems a bit absurd to me. Both Russia and China eventually did away with their commune systems because they were abject failures. So this setting is a complete fantasy. The German intrusions are real; and the resistance is real, but the Russian resistance to the Germans at the beginning of the German invasion was practically negligible; not as fierce as portrayed in this film. The Germans would never have been able to conquer one third of Russia in less than a year unless there was little resistance. So basically, this story is a nice fantasy; but the military resistance of the Russians was minimal in the first year or so. Entertaining as a fantasy, but some people might think it is real.