Winter Story
A Cold War melodrama from 1948, The Iron Curtain, directed by William A. Wellman, tells the true to life story of a Soviet defector, Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews). In 1943, when the U.S.S.R. was Canada's ally against Nazi Germany, Gouzenko was sent to Ottawa to work secretly as a cipher clerk. His job entailed going to a building run by the Soviets, entering a series of high security rooms and deciphering communications; in effect, spying on the Canadian government and also the Americans. His work, completed at the end of every shift, would be burned. He had access, though, to master files, was able to spend a great deal of time working by himself, Russian music always playing loudly in the complex of rooms on a sound system to drown out possible surveillance.
The music by Shostakovich, Prokoviev, and other Russian composers, acts as a real, practical background, while it also highlights the drama of the scenes, the characters; from the boss running the operation downward, always surrounded by high intensity music that sometimes reflects their own dilemmas.
Gouzenko's dilemma starts, ironically enough, when his pregnant wife (Gene Tierney) comes to Ottawa to live with him. This arrangement helps normalize Gouzenko in the eyes of contemporary society, but what isn't normal are the strictures placed upon the couple by their Soviet masters. They're not to fraternize with locals, not to blend in, which includes going to church, or even being friendly to neighbors. This clear error on the Soviet authorities' part makes them and everyone else infiltrating Canada's capital stand out, since they don't act like normal people. Gouzenko takes readily to the required aloofness, but his wife, Anna, can't handle it very well.
Two years go by, during which Gouzenko deciphers at work information about what came to be known as the Manhattan Project. The Soviets are of course quite interested in the Americans' development of the atom bomb and its use on two Japanese cities. This, along with pressure from his wife, pushes Gouzenko towards wanting to share his story with Canadian authorities, but the government doesn't take him seriously, nor do the newspapers. By this time, endangered by his theft of top secret documents from his workplace, Gouzenko, his wife, and their baby son struggle to locate a sympathetic ear, even as Soviet agents close in on them.
It's a suspenseful and well-made film with many interesting dramatic and psychological turns. Wellman, who'd been directing films since 1920, had by then a ready facility with the skills helpful in moviemaking. He made The Public Enemy, The Ox-Bow Incident, Nothing Sacred. If you see his name in movie credits, you can be assured that competence is at work. The Iron Curtain, though it has clichéd Russian characters who themselves seem too competent in their quest for world dominance, is a good, entertaining film, its exteriors shot on location during the winter, in Ottawa itself.
Using later understood history as a guide, we now know that Josef Stalin wasn't interested in conquering the Western World. He wanted the so-called buffer states like Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, but as for actually expanding physically to North America, he wasn't ever planning on doing that. Even so, the popular view, not discouraged by irresponsible American politicians and news and entertainment media, was that, in essence, "They're coming here to get us, to take away our freedoms." This idea, so successful then as a way of keeping Americans on edge about an invisible enemy, should remind us of our current war against "terror." The Soviets and Americans did build up nuclear arsenals that created their own threats against civilization and life on Earth generally, but those activities counted then, as they do now, as self-defense (and warmongering profiteering), as we can see in other countries like China, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia.
In defense of the paranoia of the late 1940s, the nuclear weapons age was new. There have been exceedingly crappy films from the 1940s and 1950s about the "Soviet threat," but The Iron Curtain isn't one of them. It's greatest strength, I found, is its moving depiction of a husband and wife in a strange land and culture, finding their new home enticing, far more appealing than where they came from, while their temptation to give in to Ottawa's welcoming embrace causes domestic strife, Mrs. Gouzenko pleading with her husband, unhappy as he is, to see the Canadian people as good, their culture as worthy of consideration. As they attempt to embrace their own humanity, the Gouzenkos come under mounting and very dangerous suspicion from Igor's boss and the NKVD agent who takes an increasing and malicious interest in the husband.
It's the struggle between loyalty to a distant state, with its extensive and inhuman rules and codes of conduct, and loyalty to the much smaller but warmer back and forth human interchange that makes The Iron Curtain such an interesting film, which I watched on YouTube.
Vic Neptune
A Cold War melodrama from 1948, The Iron Curtain, directed by William A. Wellman, tells the true to life story of a Soviet defector, Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews). In 1943, when the U.S.S.R. was Canada's ally against Nazi Germany, Gouzenko was sent to Ottawa to work secretly as a cipher clerk. His job entailed going to a building run by the Soviets, entering a series of high security rooms and deciphering communications; in effect, spying on the Canadian government and also the Americans. His work, completed at the end of every shift, would be burned. He had access, though, to master files, was able to spend a great deal of time working by himself, Russian music always playing loudly in the complex of rooms on a sound system to drown out possible surveillance.
The music by Shostakovich, Prokoviev, and other Russian composers, acts as a real, practical background, while it also highlights the drama of the scenes, the characters; from the boss running the operation downward, always surrounded by high intensity music that sometimes reflects their own dilemmas.
Gouzenko's dilemma starts, ironically enough, when his pregnant wife (Gene Tierney) comes to Ottawa to live with him. This arrangement helps normalize Gouzenko in the eyes of contemporary society, but what isn't normal are the strictures placed upon the couple by their Soviet masters. They're not to fraternize with locals, not to blend in, which includes going to church, or even being friendly to neighbors. This clear error on the Soviet authorities' part makes them and everyone else infiltrating Canada's capital stand out, since they don't act like normal people. Gouzenko takes readily to the required aloofness, but his wife, Anna, can't handle it very well.
Two years go by, during which Gouzenko deciphers at work information about what came to be known as the Manhattan Project. The Soviets are of course quite interested in the Americans' development of the atom bomb and its use on two Japanese cities. This, along with pressure from his wife, pushes Gouzenko towards wanting to share his story with Canadian authorities, but the government doesn't take him seriously, nor do the newspapers. By this time, endangered by his theft of top secret documents from his workplace, Gouzenko, his wife, and their baby son struggle to locate a sympathetic ear, even as Soviet agents close in on them.
It's a suspenseful and well-made film with many interesting dramatic and psychological turns. Wellman, who'd been directing films since 1920, had by then a ready facility with the skills helpful in moviemaking. He made The Public Enemy, The Ox-Bow Incident, Nothing Sacred. If you see his name in movie credits, you can be assured that competence is at work. The Iron Curtain, though it has clichéd Russian characters who themselves seem too competent in their quest for world dominance, is a good, entertaining film, its exteriors shot on location during the winter, in Ottawa itself.
Using later understood history as a guide, we now know that Josef Stalin wasn't interested in conquering the Western World. He wanted the so-called buffer states like Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, but as for actually expanding physically to North America, he wasn't ever planning on doing that. Even so, the popular view, not discouraged by irresponsible American politicians and news and entertainment media, was that, in essence, "They're coming here to get us, to take away our freedoms." This idea, so successful then as a way of keeping Americans on edge about an invisible enemy, should remind us of our current war against "terror." The Soviets and Americans did build up nuclear arsenals that created their own threats against civilization and life on Earth generally, but those activities counted then, as they do now, as self-defense (and warmongering profiteering), as we can see in other countries like China, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia.
In defense of the paranoia of the late 1940s, the nuclear weapons age was new. There have been exceedingly crappy films from the 1940s and 1950s about the "Soviet threat," but The Iron Curtain isn't one of them. It's greatest strength, I found, is its moving depiction of a husband and wife in a strange land and culture, finding their new home enticing, far more appealing than where they came from, while their temptation to give in to Ottawa's welcoming embrace causes domestic strife, Mrs. Gouzenko pleading with her husband, unhappy as he is, to see the Canadian people as good, their culture as worthy of consideration. As they attempt to embrace their own humanity, the Gouzenkos come under mounting and very dangerous suspicion from Igor's boss and the NKVD agent who takes an increasing and malicious interest in the husband.
It's the struggle between loyalty to a distant state, with its extensive and inhuman rules and codes of conduct, and loyalty to the much smaller but warmer back and forth human interchange that makes The Iron Curtain such an interesting film, which I watched on YouTube.
Vic Neptune
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