Operation Manhunt (1954) DVD-R
Directed by Jack Alexander
Print: Black and White
Runtime: 77 min
Genre: Drama
In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, bolted for the freedom of the West and took many secret documents with him that helped lay waste to a good portion of Russia's Western Hemisphere spy system. His headline-making defection later served as the basis for 20th Century-Fox's "The Iron Curtain" in 1947. This film, shot in a semi-documentary style, proports to tell how the Soviets "might" attempt to kill Gouzenko, then living in carefully disguised circumstances somewhere in Canada. Gouzenko, his face covered in a Ku Klux Klan-type hood---no symbolism intended---appears in the epilogue, while Westbrook Van Voorhis, in his usual voice-of-doom "March of Time" style, narrates the opening sequence retelling the background and setting up the film's premise.