Il sipario di ferro

The defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, in 1946, was one of the most electrifying events of the Cold War. The documents and information which he brought with him, gained from his work as a top-secret cipher clerk, resulted in the destruction of the main Soviet spy ring in Canada, which included a Member of Parliament and a nuclear scientist who was working on the atomic bomb. This film, with all the locations shot in Ottawa, and its details drawn from the official reports of a Royal Commission, is a fascinating depiction of the true story of Gouzenko from the moment of his arrival in Canada, his first time outside the Soviet Union, till his defection with his wife and child. William Wellmann directed the film in a low-key style, with some documentary linking narration from time to time. Dana Andrews was never so subdued and soft-spoken as Gouzenko in this film, and Gene Tierney is remarkably self-effacing as the devoted wife and mother of an infant. She has no particularly interesting scenes. The really powerful performances in this film are by Berry Kroeger, in his first film appearance, as an insidious, swaggering and menacing mastermind of a Soviet espionage ring, and Eduard Franz as a Soviet major who 'just cannot take it any more' and turns into a drunk. The film is tense and gripping, and follows closely the real life events of this notorious story. June Havoc is effective in a minor role as the resident Soviet honeypot who tests the new staff with alcohol and seduction to see if they are indiscreet. The world inside the Soviet Embassy is convincingly and eerily depicted, a demi-monde and a half-life of people serving Stalin and the Party like grim automatons with dark faces and all humanity stripped out of them. This film gives a nice lesson in the realities of sordid power, and the hollowness of institutionalised betrayal. There are none so low as those who slither.

One of the more realistic as well as honest post WWII movies about the threat of Communism simply because it was based on a true story. The film supports the well worn notion of truth being stranger then fiction.

Setting up a number of sleeper cells at the hight of WWII in and around the Canadian City of Ottawa the Soviet Union has developed a spying apparatus that's soon to became the biggest foreign spying network in all of North America. With the head spy a Canadian Communist named John Grubb, Barry Kroeger, having a number of his team of Soviet agents in the Atomic Research Division of the Canadian Government. Glubb and his boss' back in Moscow got wind of a secret project that the US was developing in the use of atomic energy to harness and create an nuclear chain reaction, an Atomic Bomb, that will eventually be use against the axis to end the Second World War.

The movie "The Iron Curtain" has to do with Soviet cypher clerk Igor Gouzenka, Dana Andrews, who being station in Ottawa becomes very disenchanted with his country of birth, the Soviet Union, and decides to defect. Igor is hampered with the fact that he has family back in the USSR and a wife and young child Anna & Andrei, Gene Tierney & Robin Olsen, here in Canada where goons from the Soviet NKVD, working for the Soviet Embassy, can easily get their hands on them. We see Igor go through a number of stages during his stay in Canada as he soon realizes what he's missing in not living in a free country and just how hellish his home the USSR really is.

Being a good soldier, or cypher clerk, Igor does his work smoothly and without a flaw until his wife Anna ,who with Soviet Government approval, came over to visit him from the USSR and later gets pregnant with his son. All this changes Igor's feelings about his motherland, Mother Russia, in wanting his son young Andrei to live and grow up free in a free land Canada. What really pushes Igor over the line, and gets him and his wife and son to defect, is when he gets to see his best friend Maj. Semyon Kulin, Eduard Franz, crack up while gulping down a bottle of vodka and spilling his guts out. Maj. Kulin is sorry that he ever got involved with the Bolshevik/Communist regime. Knowing now just how evil it is in it doing in Kulin's his old man a great and proud leader of the 1917 Communist, or October, Revolution has driving him to drink. They, or Uncle Joe Stalin and his gang of murderous cutthroats, felt that Kulin's father was no longer useful to them and their cause in taking over, by extreme and brutal force if necessary, the both civilized and uncivilized world and thus kicked him out of power. The old and sick guy is now left to live on his meager pension in a one room walk-up, with pop suffering from a case of sever arthritis, apartment in Moscow.

It took a lot for Igor to do what he did in going over to the other side and not only revealing what he and his cohorts, both Russian and Canadians, were up to. Igor also stole from the Soviet Embassy over 100 pages of documents revealing the Soviets plan to steal the secret of the Atomic Bomb that Igor was terrified that they, the Stalin gangsters, would use to blackmail and thus take over, by hook or by crook, the free and none-Communist world.

Igor gets away from the Soviet Secret Police, the dreaded NKVD, only because their so clumsy and confused in operating in a free, unlike their home turf the USSR, and open society. Igor then had, after almost being handed over to his countrymen by a bunch of brainless and clueless Canadian bureaucrats, himself and his wife and son, Anna & Andrei,given political asylum. Igor Gouzenka died in his adopted country Canada on June 28, 1982 at the age of 63.

The vengeful Soviet Union who had put a price on his head and had dozens of secret agents looking to both find and do Igor in had him wearing a musty and smelly hood over his head in public to keep from being recognized and assassinated. This was a small price for Igor to pay to be a free man in a free land which he wasn't back home in the USSR.

P.S The famous statement "Iron Curtain" that's been attributed to Winston Churchills speech in Fulton Missouri on March 5, 1946 was actually coined by non-other then Nazi Propaganda and Culture Minister Dr. Joesph Goebbels a year earlier in an article that he wrote for the German newspaper Das Reich. Goebbels statement was broadcast by the British BBC, on Feberuary 25, 1945 in the waning weeks of the Second World War in Europe. A broadcast that Churchill obviously heard and later used Goebbels timely phrase "Eis Erner Vorhang", the Iron Curtain in German, in his Fulton speech.

Fox was doing several spy documentaries in the '40s in the style of 13 RUE MADELEINE and THE HOUSE ON 92nd STREET, and this is one of their less melodramatic stories of espionage performed in low-key style by DANA ANDREWS and GENE TIERNEY.

Andrews is Igor Gouzenko, a Russian who is part of a Canadian spy ring. He has a taste of freedom when he lives in Canada and decides to defect with his wife and young son, but not before taking classified documents with him which he intends to hand over to the authorities.

Director William A. Wellman gets just a moderate amount of suspense out of the true life story, deciding not to go for melodramatics but having the whole story played out in low-key style befitting a documentary type of film. There's even some narration to frame the story.

Andrews gives a decent performance, tight-lipped and determined to leave his Russian heritage behind and find freedom in Canada under the protection of the Royal Canadian police. Tierney gives one of her more sincere performances as the wife, concerned for the welfare of her child and his right to grow up under democracy's freedom.

A bit too much propaganda but nicely photographed and played by a competent cast, including EDUARD FRANZ in a rather showier role. Lacks the dramatic power it might have had if a more melodramatic approach had been used.

Excellent film dealing with Soviet spies operating in Canada during World War 11 and afterward.

The spying was done out of the Soviet embassy in Canada. There were plenty of non-Canadians involved in the spy ring as well.

This film was a true story. Dana Andrews gives a subdued performance as a Soviet decoder who comes to appreciate democracy. He is soon joined in Canada by his wife who is played by Gene Tierney. She brings a simplicity to the role as the Soviet wife who also comes to respect a democratic way of life.

There is an excellent performance by Eduard Franz, who plays an disenchanted alcoholic Soviet official, whose disdain for Soviet life will lead him back to the Soviet Union.

The film is exciting since it shows how no one wanted to listen to Andrews unraveling of the spy ring.

Dana Andrews is Igor Gouzenko, a Russian spy in Canada in "The Iron Curtain," a 1948 film based on a true story. Andrews plays a Russian during and after World War II who is sent to work as a code clerk for a ring in Canada; once the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, the Communists become particularly interested in documents pertaining to it. Eventually his wife (Gene Tierney) joins him and tells him that she is pregnant. With the birth of his son, and the disillusionment of one of the ring (Eduard Franz), whose father was a great leader, Gouzenko slowly begins to realize that he's on the wrong side and decides that he and his family will not return to Russia. He steals important documents from his office with the idea of handing them over to the Department of Justice before his bosses realize what has happened, but fate plays against him. It becomes a race against time to get the documents into the right hands as well as save his family, even if he can't save himself.

Done in semi-documentary style, this is a pretty good propaganda drama with fine performances from an always attractive couple, Andrews and Tierney, and a great performance by Eduard Franz in a showy role. Andrews is one of the few leading men under contract at 20th Century Fox who was served well, particularly once Fox's biggest star, Tyrone Power, went to war; the hard-bitten roles Andrews played in many film noirs have given him a place in film history. Like both Power and John Payne, he was versatile, appearing in every type of film. Not realizing he was trained as an opera singer, the studio dubbed him in "State Fair" - they'd thrown so many non-singers into musicals, it never occurred to them he actually might be one. Alcoholism cut his star years short though he continued to work and speak on behalf of facing up to alcoholism. Tierney's career had its ups and downs due to her personal life as well, but in three films, they made a wonderful couple.

Toward the end, "The Iron Curtain" becomes quite intense and exciting. Well directed by William Wellman, it's worth watching though some may not like its definite propaganda bent.