The Screen Is Red by Dick Bernard F.;

Author:Dick, Bernard F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

CURTAIN UP!

THE END OF WORLD WAR II MANDATED NEW VILLAINS. THE NAZIS AND the Japanese would never go out of vogue, but they would no longer be the satanic incarnations they were in the 1940s. Then, Nazis ranged from sadistic (None Shall Escape [1944]) to stupid (Desperate Journey [1942]). The Japanese were not even worthy of a range. They were Yellow Peril grotesques who inserted bamboo shoots under fingernails (Behind the Rising Sun [1943]), gouged out eyes and pulled out tongues (Manila Calling [1942]), and gang raped Chinese women (China [1943], Dragon Seed [1944]).

A year after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, convinced that left-wing screenwriters were inserting communist propaganda into their films (e.g., “Share and share alike” in Tender Comrade [1943]), launched an investigation in October 1947 into the alleged communist subversion of the movie industry. In February that year, a four-part series, Igor Gouzenko’s “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” began in Cosmopolitan magazine, concluding in May just as HUAC engaged in a dress rehearsal in Los Angeles for a full-scale, media-covered witch hunt in the fall. If Gouzenko had been in the movie business, he would have been HUAC’s poster boy.

In 1943, the Ukrainian born Gouzenko was flown to Ottawa, Canada, to work as a cryptographer at the Soviet Embassy. It was his first trip abroad. He would not be returning to Russia. Initially, Gouzenko observed the protocols, learning to answer questions by providing only basic information. With the locals, he was courteous but aloof—in short, a model apparatchik. He began to change when he discovered messages that he encoded and others that he decoded revealed the existence of a Soviet spy network run by a military attaché at the embassy. The spies included some high-ranking Canadians, even a member of Parliament. At first, the classified material only piqued Gouzenko’s curiosity, but over the next two years, he became increasingly disenchanted with communism. Living in Canada had awakened him to the freedom enjoyed by others, who, unlike himself, were not government automatons. He was also loath to return to Russia, where he would be a low-level code clerk. Defection was the only alternative. He also knew how he could make himself useful to the Canadian government.

On 5 September 1945, a month after the bombing of Hiroshima, Gouzenko stuffed 109 classified documents under his shirt. These contained enough evidence to arrest thirty-nine people and convict eighteen of them. But defection was not as simple as Gouzenko thought. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not believe him, and the Ottawa Journal was not interested in the documents. Finally, through the intervention of the undersecretary for external affairs, Gouzenko and his family were granted asylum, which came with a price: The family lived under an assumed name outside of Toronto, and Gouzenko always wore a hood when interviewed on television.

Shortly after the first installment of “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring” appeared, Twentieth Century-Fox purchased the movie rights, changing the title to The Iron Curtain (1948).

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