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Mixed Motives: Soviet Symphonies and Propagandistic Duplicity in The Iron Curtain (1948)
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

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

Nathan Platte
Music & politics, Vol.16(2), 2
08/19/2022
DOI: 10.3998/mp.3109
url
https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.3109View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

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.
 Music film music Alfred Newman Soviet Union Hollywood compilation soundtrack Cold War

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