Review of The Iron Curtain

This is one of the best espionage thrillers ever made, because it is all true. Wellman's ambition with this film must have been to make it as documentary as possible in truthfulness, accentuating the genuineness by only using music of Soviet composers, which strengthens the terror and horrible tension of the conditions of this story. Wellman did some of the best war films ever made, he was himself in the First World War, so he knew something about that reality, and his realism is 100%. Gouzenko (Dana Andrews) is a very correct and strict Soviet official sent to work at the Soviet embassy of Canada in Ottawa, and the entire film is shot on location. Gene Tierney plays his wife most admirably, being the one person who gives vent to her humanity, and without that wife Gouzenko's defection would not have succeeded. He and his family lived under governmental protection for the rest of their lives, and when he gradually agreed to appear on television he insisted on never showing himself in public without a mask. He lived to write two novels, one about his defection which provided the story of this film, and later "The Fall of a Titan" where he tried to expose the murder of Maxim Gorkiy by the Stalin authorities. The film like his novels exposes the mentality of authoritarian fear which was the dominating trait of Russian communism as long as it was in power, and which still shows up its monstrous paranoid mentality in the politics of Vladimir Putin - the problem is actual still today.