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The Man Who Might Have Been: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Herbert Norman. Produced by Louise Lore and Gerry Flahive; National Film Board of Canada; directed by John Kramer; 1998. Colour; 98 minutes. $19.95 home, $39.95 institutional
The Sleep Room. Produced by Bernard Zukerman Productions and CINAR Productions; directed by Anne Wheeler; 1998. Colour; 182 minutes
The Un-Canadians. Produced by Joanne Smale Communications in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada; directed by Len Scher; 1996. Colour; 72 minutes. $19.95 home, $39.95 institutional
The Cold War has not been a subject close to the heart of Canada, as it has been in the United States. It might be argued that Canada was central to the eruption of the Cold War, since it was the site of the defection of cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa in September 1945, which was an early cause of the post-Second World War renewal of hostilities between the USSR and the West. But viewed in retrospect, Gouzenko's historical place is far smaller than his own inflated ego wished it to be. And although Gouzenko's defection led to the arrest and conviction of eleven people in Canada and Britain, this country did not fall far into the pit of Cold War accusation and recrimination which afflicted America.
Moreover, aside from some journalistic interest in Gouzenko, found in such works as John Sawatsky's Gouzenko: The Untold Story, regrettably little has been written in this country on the domestic impact of the worldwide shift to the political right in the late 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, before the publication in 1994 of Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse's authoritative Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957, there was little of substance on the subject.(f.1) Authors in the United States still crack heads over issues such as the guilt or innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss, and the era which ended in 1989 is still troubling enough to the American psyche that Ted Turner could recently produce and broadcast a twenty-four-part series on his Cable News Network called simply The Cold War.
In film, Canada played a minor role in the onslaught of Cold War propaganda when The Iron Curtain, a...