Kino Lorber has released Lewis Milestone’s The North Star on Blu-ray from the film’s 2022 restoration of the 1943 film along with Armored Attack, the heavily re-edited 1957 re-release of the film from its 2013 restoration.

The North Star, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, was one of three 1943 films, along with Warner Bros.’ Mission to Moscow and MGM’s Song of Russia, to depict Stalin’s Russia in a positive light due to our World War II alliance with the U.S.S.R.

In 1947, HUAC (The House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress) in its investigation of Hollywood Communists branded all three films as Russian propaganda. Ten years later, following the Russian invasion of Hungary, Goldwyn had The North Star re-edited and re-released as Armored Attack eliminating the film’s bucolic first 35 minutes and beginning with the German aerial attack on the Ukrainian villagers. A new voiceover compared the German invasion of Ukraine to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. The remaining scenes were reorganized and the film’s best performance, that of Walter Huston, was all but eliminated.

Seen today in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the original film takes on a whole new meaning.

It begins with Dana Andrews leading a group of high schoolers on a road trip from their peaceful Northern Ukraine village on a visit to Kyiv. The students are played by Anne Baxter, Farley Granger, and Jane Withers among others. Older residents of their village include Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Ann Harding, Dean Jagger, Ruth Nelson, and Esther Dale. Along the way they are attacked by German planes, and the group scatters. Huston is separated from the group and ends up in a German encampment where evil German doctor Erich von Stroheim is draining blood from children to use for transfusions for injured German soldiers. After one of the children dies, Huston shoots and kills von Stroheim and his assistant and returns to the reassembled group which is beginning to recover from the shock of the aerial attack.

The story is a bit simplistic. The musical score by Aaron Copland is good but the songs by Copland and Ira Gershwin such as “Song of the Fatherland” and “No Village Like Mine” are jaw-droppingly awful. Nevertheless, the film did garner six Oscar nominations including one for Copland’s score as well as those for Lillian Hellman’s screenplay which she later renounced, James Wong Howe’s exquisite cinematography, along with the film’s Art Direction, Sound Recording, and Special Effects.

Olive Films released the 2013 restored version of Armored Attack on Blu-ray in 2014 but The North Star has hitherto only been available in a dreadful public domain version from 2016. Neither contained commentary. The Kino Lorber release of the two versions on separate discs includes excellent commentary for both. Adrian Martin provides commentary on The North Star while Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin do the same for Armored Attack.

Mill Creek has released a Blu-ray of two films made sixteen years apart that seemingly have no connection to each other than they both begin with a wedding at which the central figure was a bridesmaid.

Lasse Hallstrom’s 1991 film, Once Around was the Swedish director’s first American film. It was made six years after My Life as a Dog which earned him dual Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay and two years before What’s Eating Gilbert Grape firmly established him as an American director of note.

Once Around revolves around Holly Hunter then at the height of her career, four years after Broadcast News and two years before The Piano. It begins with the wedding of Hunter’s sister (Laura San Giacomo) and Hunter’s attempts to get her live-in boyfriend Griffin Dunne to propose to her. After he tells her he will never marry her, she moves back in with her parents (Danny Aiello and Gena Rowlands), quits her waitressing job, and goes to Florida to learn how to sell condos. There she falls for her annoying mentor, a suddenly gray-haired Richard Dreyfuss that her father is not at all happy with. After a whirlwind romance, they marry and the schism between Dreyfuss and papa Aiello escalates.

That’s basically all there is to the story, but it’s played with such charm, especially by Aiello, who sings several standards at various family functions, that you can’t help liking it.

The second film on the disc is Lajos Koltai’s 2007 film, Evening. It is the only film directed by the Oscar-nominated cinematographer of 2001’s Malena and such other films as 1995’s Home for the Holidays and 2004’s Being Julia.

Based on Susan Minot’s novel of the same name with a screenplay by Minot and Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, the film is structured much like Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film of The Hours. Both take place in three distinct eras.

The film opens in the then-present with Vanessa Redgrave as a dying woman with two daughters (Toni Collette and Redgrave’s real-life daughter Natasha Richarson) who drifts in and out of consciousness remembering a long-ago wedding. Played in flashback by Claire Danes, Redgrave’s character is the maid of honor to best friend Mamie Gummer’s Newport, Rhode Island society wedding. Prior to and after the wedding she hangs around with Gummer’s brother Hugh Dancy and Dancy’s best friend Patrick Wilson, a young doctor whose mother was Gummer and Dancy’s parents’ maid. Their parents are played by Glenn Close and Barry Bostwick.

After the wedding, tragedy strikes, and Gummer and Danes are no longer friends.

There are also flashbacks to Danes/Redgrave’s early days as a well-known singer, a single mother bringing up her two girls after she is abandoned by two husbands.

In the present, night nurse Eileen Atkins facilitates a reunion between Gummer (her character is now played by Gummer’s real-life mother Meryl Streep) and Redgrave on her deathbed.

In addition to the mother-daughter casting of Redgrave and Richardson and Streep and Gummer, the film also features the pairing of future husband and wife Dancy and Danes.

Happy viewing.