The North Star (1943)

[last lines]
[the villagers flee their burning town, torched as part of the Russians scorched earth defense]
Marina Pavlova: Gone.
Sophia Pavlova, Rodion's wife: There'll be another some day.
Marina Pavlova: Yes. It will be different for us. Wars don't leave people as they were. All people will learn this and come to see that wars do not have to be. We'll make this the last war. We'll make a free world for all men. The earth belongs to us, the people, if we fight for it. And we will fight for it!

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Boris Stepanich Simonov, truck driver: Comrades, we have good reasons to know our country is at war. In our small village alone, 30 people have been injured. Eleven people have been killed. But his is not a time for mourning - it is time for revenge. We will divide into two groups, each to do his duty from this day until death. The able-bodied men are to come forward to the right of this building. We will move from our village to the hills to take our position as guerrillas. I will go immediate to comrade Commander Petrov's garrison to get the guns. The second group has the hardest job. They must stay behind. As guerrillas, we must have aid and information. As villagers you must, before the entrance of the Germans, destroy everything. Everything, comrades! The houses you have built, the crops you have sown with your hands, the cattle you have raised. The Germans are not more than fifty miles away. Yours is the dangerous job. For this job you will volunteer. It is you who may have to live with the... the Germans.

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Dr. von Harden: [while Dr. Kurin is holding a gun on Richter and von Harden] I do not like much of what I've done for the past nine years.
Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin: [after von Harden has given a blood transfusion from a Russian child to a German soldier] You do not like bleeding children?
Dr. von Harden: Did the boy die?
Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin: [Contemtuously] You knew he would die!
Dr. von Harden: They took too much blood. I'm sorry for that.
Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin: Yes, I nelieve you when you say you are sorry.
Dr. von Harden: I'm sorry for many things, Dr. Kurin. Most of all that this is not the world we used to know.
Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin: I've heard about you... civilized men who are sorry. This...
[Contemptuously gesturing toward Richter]
Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin: This kind is nothing! They will go when their bosses go, but men like you who have contempt for men like him! To me you are the real filth... men who do the work of Facists while they pretend to themselves that they are better than the beasts for whom they work... men who do murder while they laugh at them who order them to do it. It is men like you who have sold their people to men like him.
[He points to Richter and shoots him at point blank range]
Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin: You see, Dr. von Harden, you were wrong about many things. I AM a man who kills!
[He shoots von Harden at point blank range too]

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This is one of the films deemed "subversive" by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in October, 1947, at the height of the McCarthy "Red Scare" era. The committee decided that, even though Russia was our ally against Nazi Germany in World War II - when this film was made - the movie's sympathetic portrayal of Russian peasants and guerrillas who were fighting off Nazi forces was an "endorsement" of Communism.
Film debut of Farley Granger.
"The Screen Guild Theater" broadcast a 30 minute radio adaptation of the movie on January 3, 1944 with Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Jane Withers and Farley Granger reprising their film roles.
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