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.
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