Starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney; dir; William Wellmann

Iron Curtain is a strong little espionage thriller that deserves a wider audience and greater recognition. It certainly has star power, with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney reprising their double act that worked so well in Laura (1944) and Where the Sidewalk Ends, but keeping it fresh by moving into yet another arena, the domestic tensions that lay behind Cold War headlines.

It’s beautifully dark, with lots of shadowy drawing rooms hosting the unfolding narrative, giving it a deeply noir feel. Location shooting in Ottawa adds to the dramatic interest with the carefully selected, vaguely Gothic, institutional locations providing a visual counterpoint to those interiors, paralleling the film’s story of secretive forces trying to undermine government and individuals out in the open.

Iron Curtain is based on the actual events surrounding Soviet encoding clerk Igor Gouzenko (Andrews) in Russia’s Canadian embassy from the mid-late forties. Canada’s own contributions to atomic weapons research combined with its proximity to America made this a frontline staging post in the emerging Cold War. Encrypting top secret messages to Moscow, the idealistic Gouzenko increasingly could harbor no illusions about the real agenda of his spymasters. Thus souring on his homeland, as he and his wife (Tierney) came to love the ‘generous, trusting openness’ of their host country (ref: Hyde), they decide to defect with their infant son, taking key nuclear secrets with them. It’s a great story, and director Wellmann, better known for robust action flicks and screwball comedy, shows he can handle a moody thriller quite effectively.

Nevertheless there’s something of a dated, stodgy feel to Iron Curtain, by 1948 standards. On closer examination, a reason for this suggests itself. This was the first screenwriting credit in eight years for Milton Krims, "an old hand of Hollywood progressivism" from the 1930s (ref: Giovacchini), who put his beliefs into effect by writing the legendary Confessions of A Nazi Spy (1939), Hollywood’s first and, with Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) bravest, anti-fascist film of the strained peacetime era that preceded Pearl Harbor.

The similarities between Iron Curtain and Confessions of A Nazi Spy go deep. Both broke fresh ground by adapting the semi-documentary ‘ripped from the headlines’ tabloid movie style to an emerging contemporary political crisis. Both focussed on the underlying criminality of the political bullying to re-energize the tried and true gangster archetypes of 1930s Hollywood. In Iron Curtain Dana Andrews’ democracy-loving Russian codemaker risks his life to protect his family and their ideals against shadowy totalitarian thugs, indistinguishable from any number of prewar American gangsters and/or Nazis.

Besides Krims, two more of the filmmakers who publicly opposed Hitler before 1942 and thus risked being, in the McCarthy HUAC environment, labelled ‘premature anti-fascists’, played key roles in Iron Curtain. Studio boss Darryl Zanuck, a prominent prewar anti-Nazi and driving force (ref: Dick) behind arguably the greatest of Hollywood’s prewar anti-Nazi dramas, The Man I Married (aka I Married A Nazi – 1940) was heavily involved in this film’s script rewrites. Iron Curtain’s postwar reunion of premature anti-Nazis is completed by its producer Sol Siegel, who produced numerous prewar anti-fascist B-movies (Women in War, Three Faces West [both 1940], World Premiere [1941] ) made by many future victims of the Hollywood Blacklist.

The on-screen action reflects these films’ common heritage. In many of Hollywood’s "modest prewar cycle of anti-Nazi feature films" (Doherty) a lone male protagonist stands firm against the faceless threat (qv. Escape [1940]) and that pattern continues here, with Soviets in long trenchcoats substituting for jackbooted SS.

Ironically this revived 1930s trope was not a last gasp but a first shot, starting the new cycle of anti-Commie films of the early fifties, which would mutate into the ‘alien invasion’ Red Scare cycle of Cold War flying saucer flicks. A wheel had come full circle and was about to get weird.

Iron Curtain is today rightly renowned as one of the least hysterical and more sober of the fifties’ anti-Communist cycle. Perhaps this helps explain why its historical importance has been overlooked, along with its inherent cinematic pleasures. Both reputations deserve to be rehabilitated.

• Roger Westcombe

References

Dick, B (1996). The Star-Spangled Screen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Doherty, T. (1999). Projections of War – Hollywood, American Culture and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press.

Giovacchini, S (2001). Hollywood Modernism – Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hyde, H.M. (1980). The Atom Bomb Spies. London: Hamish Hamilton.