Armored Attack! Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

Armored Attack! Blu-ray Movie Review

Mother Russia or Soviet Menace, take your pick.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 21, 2014

If you’d like a nice little cinematic example of our often volatile relationship with Russia (and/or the Soviet Union), look no further than The North Star and its redaction Armored Attack. With world tensions at an all time high, it’s perhaps harder than ever to remember that the Soviet Union was once an ally of the United States, albeit one probably largely of convenience (and considering the nation’s former alliances, arbitrariness). But in 1943, the American film industry was churning out patriotic fodder to rouse the spirits of a war weary people, and a blatant piece of propaganda emphasizing the noble aspirations of the Soviet populace was released through the auspices of Samuel Goldwyn Productions. Written by Lillian Hellman and directed by Lewis Milestone, The North Star had a large and largely A-list cast, including past and future Academy Award winners or nominees Anne Baxter, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan and Walter Huston. Aside from Hellman and Milestone, the “below the line” talent was no less notable (pun intended), including the then dean of American composers, Aaron Copland, providing a rather curiously Americana sounding score. The North Star was a big production and actually received six Academy Award nominations (including two for Hellman and Copland), but it was obviously a product of its times and once World War II ended and the United States’ relationship with the Soviet Union soured to the point that nuclear holocaust was more than a mere possibility, certain reactionary elements in America started holding the film up as one of the most salient examples of Communist influence in Hollywood. Never mind that the film was obviously intentionally fashioned as a sort of cinematic love letter and/or rah rah spirit raiser for our then ally—the 1950s were awash in anti-Soviet rhetoric and behavior, and The North Star fell victim to that proclivity. In 1957, the film was completely recut and re-released as Armored Attack. Gone were large pastoral swaths evoking the harmony of collective farms and the communal approach favored by the Soviets. Inserted were a minor host of new anti-Soviet elements, including an allusion to the then front page news of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Watching the two versions in quick succession is like having a CliffsNotes’ summation of our up and down history with our erstwhile “partner” in defeating Nazism. Olive Films has provided both versions on this new Blu-ray, although the product is listed under the name of the 1957 revised version.

Note: Since the “full” feature here is ostensibly The North Star, I’ll detail the major plot points of that version before discussing in brief how Armored Attack! differs from it.

In a weird bit of historical synchronicity, Ukraine is making headline news as this review is being written, while The North Star actually depicts rural Ukrainians right at the brink of the Nazi invasion. The main focus is on two interrelated families, one with a lovely young daughter named Marina Pavlova (Anne Baxter), and the other with two sons named Kolya Simonov (Dana Andrews) and Damian Simonov (Farley Granger, in his screen debut). We get little hearth and home snippets with both of these families, as well as other villagers including a kind of clunky schoolgirl named Clavdia Kurina (Jane Withers, future Josephine the Plumber), before intimations of the coming battle spill through the radio airwaves, letting the villagers know that their cherished way of life is soon to have obstacles, and in fact may be on the way to extinction. It’s notable that the film makes the Nazis out to be modern day vampires in a way, with first a radio broadcast and then an actual plot point detailing soldiers desanguinating Ukrainian children in order to provide transfusions for their wounded soldiers.

That disturbing aspect is set aside for a little while at least as The North Star instead regales the viewer with some patently odd song and dance elements which ostensibly show the simple but noble Ukrainian people engaging in wholesome activities. There is also a none too subtle emphasis on the collectivist farm system, though it’s filtered through a kind of odd Hollywoodized “small town” feeling that could just have easily been part of any given Andy Hardy feature.

Things begin to grow more ominous once the Nazis invade, and the two families, along with several hangers-on, are forced to flee. There are a number of standout sequences that Milestone stages here. Some are large (a climactic battle that includes a Nazi doctor played by Erich von Stroheim getting his comeuppance) while others are at least relatively small (a really effective sequence involving Granger and Withers where several people are being stalked simultaneously).

The film is almost comically quaint to cynical modern day eyes, though. Hellman offers contraction free dialogue which is somehow meant to imply a “native” patois, but even worse, the film is full of almost silly sounding rhetoric that is supposed to be stirring but simply comes off as hackneyed. The North Star failed ignominiously at the box office, though it was held in rather high esteem in some critical circles. It’s a historical curio, to be sure, one made even more interesting when it’s compared to Armored Attack!.

That film trims around a half hour from The North Star, most (but not all) coming from the opening sequences which detail the bucolic collectivist life of the farmers. But the film is rather subtle in other ways in its alteration of the original’s content. Now, we’re no longer ostensibly in Mother Russia (despite a few hammers and sickles that show up now and again), but in a more generic “Eastern Europe”. Furthermore, a lot of the jingoistic dialogue has been jettisoned, and even some snippets that vilified the Nazis have oddly been deleted as well. The biggest change here is probably a brief coda which includes newsreel footage of the then recent uprising in Hungary, where the none too subtle implication is that whatever struggles these now "generic" Eastern Europeans undertook to defeat a tyrannical outside power, they simply delayed the onslaught by another tyrannical power. For those who manage to spy the hammers and sickles and come to conclusion the film is still about Russia, there's an equally unsubtle message that the Soviets who struggled to throw off the yoke of a foreign power turned around to become the oppressors themselves. What’s so fascinating about all of this is how it was Soviet tradition in a way to offer what was referred to as "reeducation" or even more euphemistically as “rehabilitation” to those who strayed from Communist dogma. Here, Armored Attack! itself serves as a “rehabilitated” version of The North Star that provides a second dose of propaganda, a sort of cinematic "reeducation" as it were, for American filmgoers.

Armored Attack! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Armored Attack! and The North Star are both presented courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. Lensed by the legendary James Wong Howe (who received one of the film's Academy Award nominations), the lighting in this film often adds measurably to the ambience of both the simple farm life as well as the more frightening aspects once the Nazis invade. While the elements shared between these two are largely interchangeable (to the point that the same anomalies like scratches can be seen in the same places), to my eyes Armored Attack! looks slightly less clear and stable, though this is a incremental difference. The elements in both versions have substantial damage at times, including lots of scratches and other blemishes. There are also occasional misaligned frames or disjointed hard edits that cause momentary bumps in the proceedings. Black levels are excellent and contrast overall is very strong, supporting both bright outdoor material and both dimly lit interior scenes as well as several nighttime outdoor sequences. Fine detail is above average in close-ups. As with virtually all Olive releases, a lack of restoration also means a lack of digital interference, and the result in a nicely organic if occasionally problematic presentation.

Armored Attack! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Both films offer a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix. Armored Attack! jettisons some of Copland's score and interpolates a more menacing set of cues by Angelo Ross (the revision also features narration not in the original version, which sounds fine here). Both tracks offer decent fidelity which is occasionally hampered by slight hiss and other signs of age. Midrange is rather good here, offering good support for dialogue and the action elements.

Armored Attack! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

That's no misprint on the Main Menu: there are indeed Bonus Features on this Olive Films release!

• The North Star (1080p; 1:46:16). This is billed as a bonus, though I'd personally say this is the main feature and Armored Attack! is the supplement. Details about how the two versions differ are found above in the main body of the review.


• Radio Adaptation (29:46) features a 1944 broadcast that has several of the film's stars reprising their roles.

Armored Attack! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's hard to know which version of this story to take less seriously, the left leaning pro-Soviet ultra serious The North Star, or the right leaning, anti-Commie ultra serious Armored Attack! This is one of those rare instances where neither film is any great forgotten masterpiece, but the two together are such a fascinating example of America's own political dialectic, that this release is easily Highly recommended.