Mixed Motives: Soviet Symphonies and Propagandistic Duplicity in The Iron Curtain (1948)

The Iron Curtain and the Semidocumentary

The Iron Curtain opens with Igor Gouzenko’s (Dana Andrews) arrival in Ottawa from Moscow. His days are spent in concealed rooms of the Soviet embassy coding and decoding classified correspondences. Soviet espionage, Igor soon discovers, strains his devotion to ideals and country: a woman from the embassy attempts to seduce him as a test of his resolve; others snap and sneer mistrustfully. Major Kulin (Eduard Franz), Igor’s only friend, is jaded and depressed by his responsibilities, a premonition of what Igor may become over time. As Igor adapts to his new surroundings, a parallel narrative details the backroom dealings of Canada’s communists. Their leader, John Grubb (Berry Kroeger), collaborates with Moscow and the Soviet embassy to extract scientific secrets about the atomic bomb. Igor learns of these initiatives through work. Then his wife, Anna (Gene Tierney), arrives. She is pregnant and likes Canada—a lot. The neighbors are nice, their apartment is comfortable, and business owners hang Russian-relief signs above shops. Petitioning her husband, Anna argues that Canada is a better place to raise their child. After initial resistance, Igor changes his mind, prompted in part by the threatening tactics of his superiors and Kulin’s aggrieved warnings. Bearing evidence of his embassy’s illegal dealings, the Gouzenkos seek and receive asylum from the Canadian government. Igor’s secret investigation of his colleagues’ work exposes the spy ring, a narrative twist worth emphasizing. Unlike other espionage films of the World War II and Cold War eras, the spies’ inner circle is not brought down by intrepid FBI agents. Instead, audiences are shown that even among Soviets, a house divided cannot stand. “Good” Russians—i.e., those sympathetic to Western democracy—are key to communism’s downfall. It is this theme, in particular, that Newman’s score would reinforce.

20th Century-Fox billed The Iron Curtain as a “semidocumentary,” a subgenre developed by producer Darryl Zanuck that confronted contemporary socio-political issues. Outstanding examples include The House on 92nd Street (1945), which tackled Nazi espionage in New York City; Boomerang! (1947), which treated the sway of corrupt politicians over the justice system, and Call Northside 777 (1948), which examined the life sentencing of an innocent man. (Alfred Newman served as music director on Boomerang! and composer for Call Northside 777.) Semidocumentaries conveyed the intention of heightened realism through assorted techniques that could be deployed or dropped at will, resulting in films that blended documentary qualities with traits now associated with film noir (crime-driven plots set in urban locales featuring “gritty” cinematography and morally ambivalent or compromised characters).²⁵ As cinema historian Thomas Schatz notes, documentary techniques in these films included on-location shooting and sound, interspersed documentary footage, newsreel-like voice-over narration, “based on real events” narratives, nonactors in secondary roles, diegetic music, and “little or no underscoring.”²⁶ The House on 92nd Street, the espionage film that Zanuck cited repeatedly as his model for The Iron Curtain, features only a recurrent march theme for several action sequences, accompaniment for voice-over narration, and a few instances of plausibly positioned diegetic music.²⁷

To an extent, The Iron Curtain mimics this pattern. Indeed, Newman and Zanuck’s insistence that the score feature work by Soviet composers was intended to serve as a sonic corollary to the on-location shots, based-on-a-true-story narrative, cooperation of Canadian law enforcement, and sober voice-over narration, all announced in the film’s credits over a frantic performance²⁸ of the finale from Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 (Example 1).²⁹ In particular, viewers were notified through the credits that “Music [is] From the Selected Works of the Soviet Composers,” with a list naming Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and Myaskovsky (in that order). But adherence to semidocumentary expectations is complicated by music almost immediately. The first music heard after the opening credits sequence follows the example of other semidocumentaries by diegetically anchoring music within the onscreen world. But the selection—an excerpt from the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 6—and its use in the scene are jarringly unrealistic. They mark an early alert that The Iron Curtain will acknowledge musical methods of the semidocumentary genre but not reliably follow them.

In this early scene (5:50³⁰), Gouzenko has just arrived at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, and an employee leads him to his work space. As the employee presses a hidden door buzzer, a soft, sustained chord from tremolo strings enters (three measures before Rehearsal no. 11). With no visible source or obvious rationale, the music appears to be nondiegetic and infuses this new secret with suspense and foreboding. A curtain hanging along a wall is drawn back, revealing a door with a small round window. A man on the other side glares through the glass before opening it. Individual strings lines peel apart dissonantly as the music crescendos dramatically. As the first employee leaves, having introduced Igor to the dour cipher lieutenant Vinikov, his parting words clarify the musical accompaniment’s unusual volume. “I hope you like music,” he says before walking away, some thirty seconds after the music has entered the soundtrack. As Igor steps into the chambers, the music’s volume increases further, a reflection of both higher mixing on the soundtrack and the steady movement of the string section into a higher tessitura. After the door closes and the curtain is drawn across it, Igor’s entombment within the Soviet embassy’s inner sanctum is punctuated by a sustained, accented trill in the violins. As Igor is given a tour of the rooms, additional synch points between Shostakovich’s symphony and onscreen action belie the music’s diegetic status. While the source of the music remains unknown, a lone, upwardly straining trumpet pitted against descending tremolos in the strings seems tailored to the hero’s plight as he is escorted deeper into the intelligence departments’ chambers. In the manner of nondiegetic underscoring, a solemn timpani solo is aligned with a close-up shot of a safe bearing a “top secret” seal. While these multiple correspondences stretch the limits of musical coincidence and undermine the music’s purportedly diegetic role, Vinikov’s final lines to Igor reaffirm the music’s diegetic presence: “And don’t ask to have the music turned off. It’s a rule. The music must always play so no one can hear what’s being said in the other offices. I hate music.” (Example 2).

Although the music here upholds the expectations of its genre—namely, that semidocumentaries favor diegetic music—it betrays the spirit of cinematic realism. According to Gouzenko’s memoirs, the embassy played “jazz, monotonous soap operas, and sundry commercials.”³¹ Furthermore, Shostakovich’s symphony and the visual editing are carefully coordinated to function in a manner largely indistinguishable from nondiegetic scoring. Rather than blaring along obliviously, the Shostakovich excerpt seems a sympathetic accompaniment for Gouzenko, as he is introduced to a clandestine operation that he will later resent and resist. The music’s alliance with Igor is also reinforced negatively through dialogue. The lines spoken by Igor’s coworkers—“I hope you like music” and “I hate music”—reflect opposition to, if not necessarily immunity from, music’s affect. The impression of the music on Igor, meanwhile, is deliberately left open: his blank face betrays neither interest, apprehension, nor pleasure. This peculiar musical sequence anticipates future developments: as the film progresses, the musical accompaniment diverges even further from the musical patterns established by earlier semidocumentaries. This shift unfolds gradually, however, effecting an important change in the music’s role within the narrative.

Although early press blurbs promised The Iron Curtain as the “climax” of 20th Century-Fox’s realistic rendering of semidocumentaries, critics quickly noted discrepancies.³² As Richard Coe observed in The Washington Post, the visuals violated the semidocumentary contract: “The faces [of the Soviet spies] are sinister, drenched in artful shadows, which were conspicuously lacking in the same company’s other approaches to the semidocumentary style.” The use of Soviet music was particularly problematic. Although some critics did concede that it contributed aural “realism,”³³ Coe found it did the exact opposite, with adverse consequences for both the film and the music:

The pitch on this needless poster-like quality is also given in the music, background throbbings from the works of Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Miaskovsky, and Khachaturian [sic]. For years our country has been laughing at the Soviet government for telling its composers that its music should express an ideology. We, in our free way, have been quite willing to accept those composers’ works for the pure music that it is and we’ve so boasted. Yet, “The Iron Curtain” employs that same music as suggestive of the Soviet ideology, unsubtly suggesting sinister strains in the music to express sinister beliefs.³⁴

Coe locates an important irony, and his words remind us that works of Soviet composers carried different associations for American audiences in the 1940s than they do now, decades after the publication of Testimony (misleadingly claimed by the book’s editor, Solomon Volkov, to be Shostakovich’s defiant memoir³⁵) and the fall of the Soviet Union. As Pauline Fairclough, Terry Klefstad, and Christopher H. Gibbs observe in case studies of Shostakovich reception in the UK and US, Western audiences of the 1940s were not in the habit of seeking out subversion or dissidence in Shostakovich’s music. Such theories would gradually enter mainstream discourse after the death of Stalin.³⁶ Newman’s use of Soviet music in The Iron Curtain anticipates later developments, when the idea of Soviet composers’ obliquely expressing objections to “sinister” circumstances (namely, the violently repressive tactics of Stalin’s Soviet Union) through music became an appealing counternarrative for Western critics.

There were other ironies as well. Newman had begun building his Soviet soundtrack in January of 1948,³⁷ at the same time the Soviet Central Committee Secretary Andrey Zhdanov was at work on a resolution on the state of Soviet music. Published on February 10, 1948, the resolution named the same four composers featured in The Iron Curtain as guilty of formalist, bourgeois tendencies.³⁸ The composers found themselves in an unlikely situation: disgraced and silenced at the hands of their own government, they were now elevated to star status in Hollywood’s first postwar, anti-Soviet film, a circumstance that the American press observed in items like “Soviet-Condemned Music to be Used in Curtain.”³⁹ The Soviet newspaper Izvestia published an open letter of protest allegedly signed by the composers; it was broadcast over Radio Moscow and translated in American presses:

With a feeling of deep indignation we learned from a report in The New York Times that extracts from our musical works are being used in [The Iron Curtain]. Needless to say, none of us gave or could have given our consent for any utilization of our music… . This confirms once again the prevalent order of things in the U.S.A. in which personal rights, the right of freedom of creation and democratic principles are recognized words but unceremoniously trampled upon deeds… . We resolutely insist on withdrawal of our music from the film, The Iron Curtain.⁴⁰

Legislators fought on the composers’ behalf in New York, but with no copyright agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States, the judge affirmed the music’s public domain status in the United States and denied the motion of restraint.⁴¹ In defense of his actions, Alfred Newman informed readers that he had planned to use the composers’ works six weeks before Zhdanov’s decree.⁴² Furthermore, the studio had paid $10,000 in licensing fees to Leeds Music Co., despite the music’s public domain status in the United States.⁴³ Whether any of the funds would reach the composers, however, Newman could not say.⁴⁴

As Kiril Tomoff notes in a detailed account of the legal battles over the film’s music, “there is almost no evidence that any of the four composers named in the [New York] lawsuit … even knew about it, much less participated.”⁴⁵ Although the lawsuit ultimately failed to suppress the film’s music, the studio could hardly claim the moral high ground. As Charles Recht, the American lawyer representing the composers, observed, including the names of the composers in the credits gave the misleading impression that they had agreed to and been compensated for the use of their music.⁴⁶ This placed Alfred Newman, who had selected and conducted the music for the film, in a complicated position. His few published statements on the matter are defensive, as Zhdanov’s resolution had cast a strange light on what was already an unusual case of musical (mis)appropriation. Newman had selected the composers because they were among the most well-known Soviet composers; now their government had officially declared their music insufficiently ideological. In response, Newman adopted a position of solidarity with the composers that acknowledged their political value while still claiming for himself the archetypal role of apolitical Western classical musician. Claiming on the one hand that he was “still convinced that the embattled composers epitomize the Soviet spirit in music,”⁴⁷ Newman noted that he had set the work of his Soviet colleagues works with “reverence,”⁴⁸ “humility and conviction”⁴⁹—a counterintuitive assurance, given the anti-Soviet message of the film.

This argument reflected contradictory assumptions: that while Soviet composers’ efforts were perceived on some level to be representative of the communist state (hence their cachet for The Iron Curtain), Newman’s creative labor as a Hollywood music director served only the dramatic needs of cinematic narrative. As Newman framed it, his main responsibility was to balance musical presence with cinematic realism: “providing music for The Iron Curtain posed a serious problem, which became a challenge … . If one wishes to retain the realism of scenes where fanatical ideologies and heresies are conceived and practiced, would not the use of music rob the subject of its realism?”⁵⁰ Newman’s remarks adhere to the belief that dispassionate presentation (or, rather, the impression of dispassion) was a key factor in the semidocumentary’s potential to inform and warn audiences. In such a framework, the full threat of “fanatical ideologies and heresies” might be diminished rather than enhanced through more conventional Hollywood underscoring. But as reception from critics made clear, The Iron Curtain’s style and topic were not perceived as typical of the semidocumentary.

Newman’s challenge, then, was more difficult than his brief comments allow. Wondering if the music might “rob” the film of its realism meant ignoring the ways in which the film’s thriller-paced story beats, shadowy cinematography, and cliched villains already stretched the “realistic” qualities exhibited in documentaries. Setting music to such scenes had the effect of casting the accompanying preexistent music as complicitly melodramatic, even if such qualities were not necessarily inherent to the music in concert settings. Thus, although music would be singled out by critic Richard Coe as part of the film’s crass vilification of communists (“sinister strains … to express sinister beliefs”), Coe’s observation misses the ways in which Newman’s musical strategies accommodated different and sometimes contradictory ends, with music at times serving the film’s ham-fisted political ends while also lending greater sympathy and nuance to the story and its characters. As will be evident, Newman’s achieved this range by shifting music’s role across the film and cannily adapting musical practices deployed in wartime pro-Soviet films.

Musical Plotting

Table 2 summarizes the use of music in the film’s first twenty minutes. After a credit sequence accompanied by the opening measures of the finale from Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5, Newman turned next to three excerpts from the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 6. The first instance, discussed previously, is when Gouzenko enters the embassy’s secret chamber. Through dialogue, the music’s source is established as diegetic. In the second instance (13:30), the music’s source is again initially unclear. The sequence is set in the same secret chamber and shows Gouzenko at work. Initially, then, it is plausible that this is diegetic music. Perhaps the spies simply prefer working to Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 6. But the music also accompanies a stern male voice-over narration. “Within a few days Gouzenko settled down to the job for which he had been so well trained,” the narrator begins, detailing Gouzenko’s instructions to connect Soviet agents with John Grubb, a Canadian citizen eager to commit dark deeds. Dropping nondiegetic music behind voice-over narration was a common tactic in Hollywood studio films, with music curtaining off the narrator’s commentary from the (often silent) visuals being commented upon. Fifteen seconds into the scene, this nondiegetic status is confirmed with a visual crossfade from Gouzenko working at his desk to him accessing a file cabinet. Although the crossfade marks an unspecified leap forward in time (since we are not shown Gouzenko leaving his desk to move to the file cabinet), the Shostakovich symphony continues uninterrupted. This signals that the music, like the narration, is not anchored within the onscreen space and time shown in this brief montage. But like the first scene, the music’s placement in relation to the narrative is initially ambiguous. Newman’s musical plotting subtly unsettles the soundtrack, making it less clear whether music is serving as an aural prop within the scene or an external commentary upon it. (The fact that the music was not written specifically for the sequence further heightens the ambiguity of its commentative role.)

In the third instance of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 6, which commences two minutes later in the film, Newman finally makes the music’s placement clear. After the unseemly Grubb orders a taxi driver to take him to the members’ entrance of the House of Commons (an instruction that reveals Grubb’s governmental access), a nondiegetic excerpt from the symphony accompanies a travel montage that ends with a shot of the member welcoming Grubb to his office. As the door to the member’s chambers closes, shutting the audience out from a secret conference, the voice-over narration reenters over the symphony, explaining how public organizations like the Associated Friends of Soviet Russia served to recruit and groom agents. The excerpt ends as the next scene—set at a gathering of the Associated Friends, presided over by Grubb—commences. These three uses of excerpts from Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 6 share a melodic motif, heard prominently on solo trumpet when Gouzenko first enters the secret chamber, and chart music’s shifting placement, moving from ambiguously diegetic to ambiguously nondiegetic to pointedly nondiegetic.

These features aurally iterate the act of espionage in terms that are appropriately double-faced. On the one hand, this musical strategy mirrors Soviet machination itself. Each repetition of Shostakovich’s melody underscores a strengthening association between Shostakovich’s music and the hidden efforts of the Soviet state. Just as ideas hatched in the embassy’s secret chambers become furtive actions within the halls of the Canadian government, so too does music anchored to a hidden chamber transcend its source, infiltrating the nondiegetic score, where it acts upon audiences while remaining inaudible to characters onscreen. However, if this music seems to mark the progress of Soviet intelligence, its presence also signals the limits of such efforts. The Iron Curtain does not, after all, present a triumph of Soviet spycraft. Rather, it is a story of how such work may crumble from within once its own agents recognize the Soviet state’s inferiority to Western democracy. Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 6 serves then to emphasize this point as well. As noted earlier, there is a telling alignment of the diegetic music in the embassy and Gouzenko’s station: both serve the Soviet Union in spite of undisguised antipathy and distrust from others (“I hate music”). Once the music becomes nondiegetic, it accompanies a narrator whose omniscient grasp of the situation exceeds even Gouzenko’s growing understanding. The narrator’s vocal presence, supported by the Shostakovich excerpts, serves as warning and reassurance. By depicting secret, malevolent actions on film and marking them as such through voice-over and musical commentary, The Iron Curtain begins showing the means by which its own narrative mechanisms—including music—will identify and hold bad actors to account.

Twenty minutes into the film, an excerpt from the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 plays behind another montage with voice-over narration. But instead of fading out the music at the end of the narration, as in the previous two occurrences, the music continues into the next scene, a more intimate scene that shows Major Kulin, Gouzenko’s depressed and alcoholic coworker, awaking from bed to serve himself a drink (Example 3).

Here again, music’s relationship to the narrative appears to shift, its new role emergent. At the beginning of the cue, the lyrical secondary theme is scored for orchestral tutti as Gouzenko flips through card after card of new intelligence recruits. The return of the movement’s opening theme during the montage (a theme Newman himself described as manifesting “Russian aggressiveness”) gives way in the new scene to another iteration of the secondary theme, this time voiced gently by solo horn playing against chamber-like accompaniment.⁵¹ The swift winnowing of orchestral forces mirrors the narrative shift from Soviet spy machine to Russian individual: Kulin, a man whose disillusionment with communism has driven him to seek release through alcohol. As Gouzenko enters the room to tell Kulin that he’s learned from their superior, Ranov, that both of their wives will be joining them in Canada, Kulin mocks Gouzenko’s enthusiasm. Expressing distaste for both Ranov and his own wife, a former captain in the Red Army, Kulin tells Gouzenko that they will be lucky if the train is late, “very late.” Gouzenko’s expression betrays confusion and disappointment. As their dialogue unfolds, a fragmented rendition of the theme wafts in the upper register of the violins against meandering chromatic lines in the cellos, which eventually give way to solo woodwinds engaged in harmonically uncertain dialogue. Here, Newman uses Shostakovich’s disintegration of orchestral homophony into rivulets of unstable polyphony to contrast the ruthless efficiency of the Soviet machine with the attitudes of reluctant participants like Kulin, whose disillusionment serves as a warning to Gouzenko.

This is a pivotal moment in the film. Soviet music is no longer tied primarily to conspiring governmental forces and Gouzenko’s workroom. Instead, Shostakovich’s music underscores Kulin’s reckoning with a system from which he feels estranged. Newman emphasizes this narrative revelation by having the music overflow its semidocumentary bounds, playing long past the voice-over narration to lend Kulin’s cynical remarks greater poignancy and emotional depth. Newman’s placement of the piece encourages audience identification, even alliance, with Kulin through Shostakovich’s seemingly sympathetic commentary.

Songs of Russia: Hollywood’s Pro-Soviet Films

While this drives the musical accompaniment even further away from the semidocumentary, it brings The Iron Curtain closer to a different cinematic category: that of the pro-Soviet films made in Hollywood during World War II. Hollywood’s pro-Soviet films served the cause of the Office of War Information by rationalizing for American audiences the wartime alliance with a communist power that had maintained, until Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a non-aggression pact with the Third Reich. Films such as The North Star (1943), Mission to Moscow (1943), Battle of Russia (1943), Days of Glory (1944), and Counter-Attack (1945) ranged from war documentary to melodrama, but all emphasized the astonishing perseverance of “ordinary,” reasonable Russians against brutal Nazis. Through onscreen performances or background underscore, Hollywood music directors used Russian concert and folk music as a means of emphasizing cultural affinity over political differences. Since “we” (American audiences) enjoy Russian music, the argument went, we may celebrate our wartime alliance on cultural, if not political, grounds. This practice stands in strong distinction from that evinced in Hollywood’s contemporaneous anti-Japanese films, which, as Anthony Sheppard has argued, “marshaled preexistent European music, stereotypical Orientalist signs, and traditional Japanese music against the exotic enemy.”⁵² In contrast, pro-Soviet films’ used predominantly pre-Soviet compositions to generate American sympathy for the new ally. As Peter Kupfer has shown, Aaron Copland’s score for The North Star quotes Soviet melodies (“Internationale,” “Song of the Motherland,” “Moscow in May”) and features “new” folk melodies adapted from actual Russian songs that are performed diegetically within the film.⁵³ Not incidentally, The North Star’s male lead is played by Dana Andrews, who plays Gouzenko in The Iron Curtain.

Hollywood’s romance with Russian music and, by implication, Russia herself, is most explicit in Song of Russia (1944), an MGM film directed by Russian émigré Gregory Ratoff. While touring the Soviet Union, an American conductor (Robert Taylor) falls in love with a Russian pianist (Susan Peters) from the charming but fictional village of Tchaikovskoye, a place where agrarian comrades sing peasant choruses from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin while returning from the fields. Conductor and pianist marry; after the Nazi invasion, their performances of Tchaikovsky’s music sustain morale in Russia and generate pro-Soviet support in America. Towards the film’s conclusion, the conductor addresses a Russian radio audience, declaring: “Before I came to Russia, I knew your country only through its music. Now thanks to this tour, I’ve been able to meet you, to talk with you, to get to know you, in fact, to marry you.” Such emphatic expressions of American commitment to Russian culture and people recur throughout the film. In another scene, the conductor presents an engagement ring to the pianist after their wedding. As sotto voce oboe and violins perform the opening lyrical theme of the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, the conductor assures his confused bride that now that they are married, they can be assured that their engagement won’t ever be broken. The political metaphor looming behind this exchange is thinly veiled at best.⁵⁴

In a later scene, conductor and pianist perform Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1. Their performance is broadcast over radio across the Soviet Union. A montage shows their music wafting—figuratively and literally—through living rooms and broad natural landscapes, bridging not only disparate Soviet listeners within the film but also American spectators watching the film in theaters across their own country. The message is unsubtle but effective: Music by a Russian composer and performed through American–Soviet cooperation will lend sustenance and solidarity to those who hear it (Example 4).⁵⁵

The Song of Russia is broadly implausible, but critics welcomed its music and praised its story, including New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, who later became fiercely opposed to The Iron Curtain.⁵⁶ Philip Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times declared Tchaikovsky the star of the film, admitting that the film “works out a shade too patly for belief throughout, but thanks to the music and some superb performances … I caught myself behaving exactly as if it were on the level.”⁵⁷ One especially noteworthy endorsement came from Aram Khachaturian, whose music would be incorporated into The Iron Curtain. In a detailed review of the film, Khachaturian heralded Song of Russia as “a tribute to the cultural collaboration of the American and Russian people,” although he did consider some of the musical arrangements in poor taste.⁵⁸

Soviet Symphonies for Sympathetic Ends

Whether audiences noted the musical connection between The Iron Curtain and its pro-Soviet predecessors, The Iron Curtain’s musical accompaniment takes a similar path, using Soviet compositions in later sequences to underscore Russian characters who are portrayed as more sympathetic. Notably, Newman expands the score to include composers beyond Shostakovich, emphasizing the shift in narrative tone through a corresponding change in compositional voice. The lullaby from Khachaturian’s ballet Gayane accompanies Gouzenko and his wife, Anna, as he introduces her to their Canadian apartment and she, stunned by the beauty of their new home, tells him that she is pregnant (24:15). As one of the film’s few tender scenes, considerable space is given to the music. As the camera slowly pans the apartment, a dusky flute solo, accompanied by softly pulsing clarinets, unfolds over twenty seconds, uninterrupted by dialogue until the flute reaches the end of the phrase. When Anna explains at the end of the scene that they will have a baby, the rocking motion of the lullaby’s accompaniment takes on more literal significance, anticipating the gentle care that will unfold within their new home.⁵⁹

In the next scene, strains from Myaskovsky’s Symphony no. 21 enter as the Gouzenkos walk about Ottawa. Before the excerpt begins, a shot of Igor and Anna walking down the street is accompanied with narration: “Whenever he had time away from the embassy they would go for long walks, exploring what to them was a strange, sometimes disturbing, sometimes puzzling world.” Beneath the narration, a church organ is heard performing a prelude: diegetic music emanating from the church that the Gouzenkos are walking past. As the narration ends, an offscreen boys choir joins the organ to sing a polyphonic psalm setting. The Gouzenkos pause outside the church to exchange mystified expressions at this rare instance of sacred (and non-Soviet) music in the film. A visual dissolve to the Gouzenkos walking on a different street is matched by a shift from the diegetic church music to the nondiegetic Myaskovsky symphony (three measures before Rehearsal no. 5). As the Gouzenkos regard a Russian war relief poster hung above a store, Myaskovsky’s music plays without any narration or dialogue over it (25:30–25:54). Although it is only a brief, somber passage for sustained strings, its prominence at this juncture in the soundtrack reinforces the Western-and-Russian goodwill represented in the poster. Newman’s selection of this particular work for this particular scene may have arisen from the work’s recent compositional history. Myaskovsky’s single-movement symphony had been commissioned by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony to celebrate the orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary.⁶⁰ Premiering on August 23, 1942, Myaskovsky’s offering presented a wartime symphony that garnered respectable reviews just months before Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7, “Leningrad,” stormed American concert halls as the Soviet Union’s defiant musical response to Nazi invasion. The radio premiere of Myaskovsky’s much smaller single-movement symphony was conducted by Bernard Herrmann, who, by 1948, had become Newman’s colleague at 20th Century-Fox.⁶¹ Although presumably lost on most moviegoers, this foregrounded setting of Myaskovsky’s symphony pointed to acts of musical solidarity enacted between a Soviet composer and American musicians, a gesture of mutual respect that, like the pro-Russian war relief sign, felt precarious if not impossible amid Cold War unease. ⁶²

Newman returns to Myaskovsky’s symphony twice more in the film. Minutes later, he sets an extended version of the same passage from before as Gouzenko, called to the embassy in the middle of the night, takes dictation from his superior about new information on the Canadians’ research on the atomic bomb. Although the passage from the symphony is now relegated to supporting verbal dictation, the selection serves ironically: establishing through musical repetition a contrast between the pro-Soviet sentiments strung from sunny Ottawa streets and Soviet espionage against Canadians, unfolding under the cover of darkness. The third and final excerpt draws from the symphony’s quiet beginning for solo clarinet. It enters conspicuously during the stunned silence that follows an impassioned outburst from Anna, angry at her husband’s unceasing suspicion of all Canadians, including the neighbor who has kindly watched their baby. Myaskovsky’s symphony again receives a foregrounded position within the sonic mix, as Anna and Igor watch their sleeping baby. Anna speaks in hushed tones as lyrical clarinet gives way to sustained, gentle string textures: “Poor little fellow. It would be a pity to have him grow up thinking the world is his enemy… . These people are not our enemies; they are our friends. It is we who are acting like enemies.” It is worth pausing to emphasize the curious rhetorical flourish of this sequence. Anna’s monologue pairs a reasonable call for greater trust with self-indictment. These words are spoken to the strains of a Soviet symphony originally composed to celebrate the anniversary of an American orchestra, commandeered here to serve the cause of an anti-Soviet film. Whether Newman intended his selections to illuminate such depths of irony, Anna’s accusation that “it is we who are acting like enemies,” resonates differently once the contradiction is noticed.

If Myaskovsky’s symphony underscores the countering of Soviet distrust with Western goodwill, the adagio from Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 5 accompanies scenes in which Gouzenko feels increasingly compelled to resist his own government. In the first scene with the Prokofiev symphony, Gouzenko is shown leaving the secret room at the embassy (31:00). As he is inspected by the guard, he wryly jokes about trying to get out with a telephone book under his shirt, foreshadowing the more dangerous smuggling of documents he will attempt later. For the film’s most politically charged sequence, the adagio plays for nearly five minutes, the longest continuous musical excerpt heard in the entire film. (The excerpt begins at Rehearsal no. 58.) The scene is set at a meeting in the embassy, shortly after the Allied victory in World War II. Colonel Trigorin instructs his officers to expand their efforts to gain information on the atomic bomb from their agents. The officers depart, leaving only Gouzenko, Kulin, and Trigorin. An emotional dialogue ensues (46:40). Trigorin, attempting to dictate a memo to Gouzenko, is distracted by thoughts of the bomb’s destruction in Hiroshima: “What a weapon. I wish I knew more about it.” Kulin, already drinking, responds despondently, “One little bomb that makes a desert on which nothing can live. What more need you know?” Irritated by this response, Trigorin mocks Kulin, prompting Kulin to address Gouzenko: “Do you think I am a great fool? … Consider me carefully. I have blood on both hands and I sleep with dead faces on my eyeballs.” Gouzenko stays silent, staring ahead. Trigorin orders Kulin to cease. Kulin continues, recounting past atrocities, including his killing of ten Russian soldiers who refused to volunteer for dangerous wartime missions. “As a man, I’m called a sadist, but what of governments that pile dead on dead and justify murder as means to an end? What name do you call them?” When Trigorin warns Kulin that he may need to return to Russia, Kulin smiles darkly: “The threat of threats: to be sent back to Russia. Why should it have such an ominous sound?” Trigorin places Kulin under arrest and orders Gouzenko not to utter a word of the exchange elsewhere. Prokofiev’s adagio plods dutifully through this drama. Accompanying such dialogue, the piece shoulders new associations, evoking the reluctant trudge of unwilling Soviet warriors like Kulin and his doomed charges. The sequence also introduces a level of culpability overlooked in reviews of the film: Kulin’s shame over brutalities committed by his country is set in relief to the United States’ design and use of a devastating weapon. Why aspire to comparable atrocity? A strained, ethereal melody in the violins, when joined with Kulin’s tormented argument, seems to signal a desperate desire for release, its lyrical dissonances conveying the poignance of such efforts (Example 5).

This scene marks the tipping point: Gouzenko visits Kulin to express his own growing self-doubt and desire to do what is best for his baby son. Following the meeting, Gouzenko is shown walking down the street (53:40). Reminiscences of words spoken by Kulin, Anna, and Trigorin swell and swirl on the soundtrack, an aural representation of Gouzenko’s anxious mind and growing conviction that he must resist. Amidst this interior dialogue is the dynamic climax of Prokofiev’s adagio, where the steady march of the movement approaches a terminal reckoning. The music sits remarkably high in the mix, nearly drowning out the other voices as the full brass section blasts forth regimented dotted rhythms, followed by anguished, dissonant chords (Example 6).

Like the Myaskovsky, Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 5 was another wartime work. It premiered in the United States after the Allies’ victories in Europe and Japan. Prokofiev’s explanation that the symphony depicted the “spirit of man,” while generic, was picked up in American presses.⁶³ As Simon Morrison has noted, the “evocative score [was] interpretable as a parable about the war—before, during, and after—and about civilization thwarting annihilation.”⁶⁴ Such themes mapped well onto the new context into which Newman placed the piece, where discerning Russians, like their American counterparts, were impelled to resist authoritarianism on humanitarian grounds.

With Shostakovich Symphony no. 6 linked to the creeping threat of communist espionage and the music of Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian marshaled in support of oppressed Russians and their encounters with Western goodwill, Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5, with which the movie opens, noticeably defies either categorization—even when imposed by characters in the film. In one scene (34:53), Soviet agent and archvillain John Grubb visits a nuclear scientist’s home to coerce him into sharing research. As he takes in the scientist’s quarters, Grubb pauses to peruse the record collection. After identifying a recording of Shostakovich, he cues the record to an interior passage from the third movement (Rehearsal no. 83). After low strings gravely intone a chant-like melody, a lone oboe sounds plaintively over violin tremolos as Grubb murmurs “beautiful, the first flowering of a true proletarian culture,” then threateningly interrogates the reluctant agent: “Have you gone over to the capitalist enemy?”⁶⁵ Here Shostakovich’s strains offer pained witness to ideologically motivated violence—an interpretation of Shostakovich’s music that would prove compelling among Western audiences and scholars in the following decades (Example 7). In contrast to the scene from Song of Russia in which Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 binds together people and nations, the placement of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 in this scene acoustically accentuates division. Whether Grubb truly “hears” proletarian culture in Shostakovich’s music, his need to politically orient the passage asserts morally objectionable qualities within the film’s framework. Not only is he a scheming villain, but he also reduces music to a political cudgel, thereby denying the democratic ideal that artists must be free to create beyond the confines of political ideology.⁶⁶ Yet Richard Coe of the Washington Post believed the film to be no better than Grubb: it too, argued Coe, politicized music when Americans were accustomed to “laughing at the Soviet government for telling its composers that its music should express an ideology.” Although Coe does not elaborate upon this point, his complaint suggests the film as a whole commits the same sin as Grubb, reducing and weaponizing music of Soviet composers to political ends.

However, if The Iron Curtain’s political argument seems as crassly overdetermined as Grubb’s explanation of Shostakovich’s music, Newman’s repetition of a passage from the finale of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 allows more space for ambivalence. Namely, music that had accompanied the montage of Soviet infiltration (described above) is reused as Gouzenko, in preparation for defection, plunders his own embassy’s classified files and slips past the guard, his shirt stuffed with secrets. The reuse of the same passage from the symphony invites comparison across the scenes, and the continuity of context played against a slippage in affiliation from Soviet infiltration to Gouzenko’s defiant counterespionage leverages music’s polyvalent capacity. Has Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5, like Gouzenko, “switched sides” to that of resistance against the Soviet Union’s plotting? Regardless, Newman’s selection muddies the moral waters, suggesting some level of equivalency among spies, whether they be for democratic or communist gain. Critics in The Washington Post and New Yorker complained that Zanuck’s film seemed oblivious to its own double standard on espionage (that spying was apparently only evil when committed by communists), but Newman’s placement of Shostakovich’s music provides an important exception to that general impression, discreetly expressed through the careful selection and placement of musical passages.⁶⁷ It is from this example that we can begin to better understand the ways in which music in service of a propagandistic film is not as easily reducible as the narrative to which it is appended.

Conclusion

In October 1947, as screenwriter Milton Krims labored to complete The Iron Curtain’s script, Hollywood studio executives answered to HUAC for their production of films like The North Star and Song of Russia. Russian-born author Ayn Rand served as expert witness, denouncing the dangers of Song of Russia, which showed Soviet citizens enjoying material goods and children smiling.⁶⁸ Only several years earlier, such films had been celebrated as a vital part of Hollywood’s wartime service. Now they appeared suspicious, quite possibly the work of communists among Hollywood’s ranks. Given this context, it is tempting to dismiss The Iron Curtain as a “protection payment” signaling Hollywood’s readiness to appease HUAC.⁶⁹ Instead of American allies, Soviets are now the new Nazis in Hollywood films. But the particulars of Gouzenko’s story, which depend upon him, a Soviet citizen, breaking the ring (as opposed to the FBI or Canadian authorities) and Newman’s use of Soviet composers’ music to accompany the story in a manner reminiscent of the pro-Soviet wartime films complicates the picture in valuable ways.

On the one hand, Newman’s decision to feature Soviet concert compositions played to semidocumentary strategies: To support a story of actual Soviet espionage, The Iron Curtain incorporated excerpts of music from actual Soviet composers. (That Gouzenko’s particular story did not directly intersect with Soviet concert composers’ music was fixed by having the Soviet embassy play Shostakovich’s symphonies as a security measure, a detail inspired by but not exactly congruent with Gouzenko’s published account.) On the other hand, Newman’s compiled score is not confined—like music in other 20th Century-Fox semidocumentaries—to serving as a diegetic prop or accompaniment to voice-over narration. Instead, it gradually takes on the qualities of typical Hollywood underscore, with the music of Soviet composers implemented to elicit emotional identification with the film’s sympathetic characters. This use of foreign-yet-familiar music to emphasize shared qualities resembled musical practices from pro-Soviet wartime features. As Peter Kupfer notes, “in Song of Russia [Tchaikovsky’s] music functions less as an emblem of Russia and more as a catalyst for emotional transference,” with Tchaikovsky’s music serving as “the great unifier” among American and Russian characters.⁷⁰ In The Iron Curtain, Newman sets Soviet composers’ music to signal shared values among “good” Soviets and American audiences while marking “bad” Soviets as incapable of enjoying or appreciating Soviet music beyond its supposed adherence to ideological slogans.

Music in The Iron Curtain is ultimately founded on contradictions. While critics reasonably faulted the filmmakers for using the composers’ Soviet status to politically essentialize and commandeer their works for anti-Soviet propaganda, Newman’s positioning of the music within the film and his public remarks express respect for and solidarity with his Soviet colleagues. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian were, after all, accustomed to composing for politically edged films that, while not necessarily representing the composer’s personal convictions, nonetheless brought them political and financial reward.⁷¹ And whereas the Soviet government had denounced these composers for ostensibly composing expressively inaccessible music, Newman’s setting of their work in a Hollywood film demonstrated these composers’ currency in popular (and capitalist) media. Like the film’s depiction of Gouzenko, music inextricably associated with the Soviet regime could be used by others to endorse or undermine it.⁷²

Consequently, Newman’s compiled score both perpetuates and challenges simplistic correlations between music and propaganda by allowing space for multiple ironies. The overt irony of the film’s music—that Soviet composers were being deployed to fight for an anti-Soviet cause—is joined by others. These include Newman’s unexpected position of defending composers disgraced by the Soviet government as American critics decried his (or the studio’s) misappropriation of the composers’ music for The Iron Curtain, a complaint built upon an incomplete characterization of music’s role in the film. These compounding ironies produce a pronounced and, under the circumstances, appropriate “doubleness,” a phenomenon noted by Richard Taruskin in which Shostakovich’s music manages to accommodate conflicting subtexts.⁷³ In The Iron Curtain, music’s doubleness not only encourages one to consider ruptures between official Soviet policy and its people—the overt propagandistic message of the film—but also between its music and those who “speak” on its behalf, whether from Moscow, Hollywood, or the critic’s desk. Music renders this particular Iron Curtain more permeable than its onscreen narrative might otherwise acknowledge, inviting us to scrutinize anew the slippery threads meant to bind music, film, politics, and reception.