Music & Politics 16, Number 2 (Summer 2022), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.3109 Mixed Motives: Soviet Symphonies and Propagandistic Duplicity in The Iron Curtain (1948) NATHAN PLATTE Abstract For Darryl Zanuck’s anti-communist film The Iron Curtain (1948), music director Alfred Newman compiled a score from the symphonic works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and Myaskovsky. The Soviet selections remained even after legal efforts on behalf of the composers sought to remove them. Scholarship on The Iron Curtain has acknowledged the courtroom wrangling but not the capacity for outside music to sustain and complicate a propagandistic narrative. This article considers Newman’s setting of music within the film, which shifts from the spare, predominantly diegetic musical accompaniments used in Zanuck’s other “semidocumentaries” to a style patterned after pro-Soviet Hollywood films made during World War II in which Russian musical selections encouraged sympathetic audience responses. Drawing upon contemporary press coverage and production materials, this study shows how The Iron Curtain’s unusual compilation soundtrack both affirms and subverts ideologies imposed upon it. In May of 1948, 20th Century-Fox’s The Iron Curtain opened amid a carefully planned uproar. 1 As Hollywood’s first explicitly anti-Soviet film of the postwar period, The Iron Curtain had been designed to provoke as much as inform. Based on the published accounts of Igor Gouzenko, a Russian cipher clerk who had worked in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, during and following World War II, the film depicted Soviet efforts to steal information on the atomic bomb, a ploy that is revealed when Gouzenko defects, bringing with him documents detailing the spy ring’s activities. 2 Not surprisingly, the Soviet newspaper Pravda preemptively denounced the “American gangsters” who had made the film and berated the Canadian government for not stopping it. 3 After the film’s release, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther excoriated the filmmakers in multiple articles, predicting that the film would “aggravate anger and anxiety, suspicion, The author gratefully acknowledges the many helpful suggestions offered by the anonymous reviewers of this article. Special gratitude is also extended to Edward Comstock, who facilitated access to archival materials related to the film held at the Cinema-Television Library, Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. 1 Kiril Tomoff, one of the only scholars to write about the music of The Iron Curtain, offers an engrossing account of the film’s release in New York City. See Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 20–21, https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501701825. 2 Igor Gouzenko’s memoirs were first serialized for Cosmopolitan as “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” published in the February, March, April, and May issues in 1947. Gouzenko also published a separate, book-length account, The Iron Curtain (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948). 3 D. Zaslavsky, “Canadian ‘Moviestars’ of Hollywood,” Pravda, February 25, 1948, 3. “They expect praise, which [the film] will not receive,” promised Zaslavsky. “They will receive disgrace, which they did not expect.” Translation by the author.