THE BRONX—What is it about Gene Tierney’s face? In Otto Preminger’s Laura, she is the face in the portrait on the wall that mesmerizes the cop investigating her murder, a face that puts her in the crosshairs of the obsessive newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, who can’t seem to kill the right victim. Put a pair of sunglasses on that face and it turns into the cold visage of an obsessive wife who lures her husband’s hapless younger brother into drowning in John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven. She is the frantic kleptomaniac wife of a prominent psychoanalyst in Preminger’s Whirlpool who falls prey to blackmail for shoplifting from a department store at the hands of a master hypnotist. By turns a face of innocence and 20th century American pluck that can turn involuntarily into that of a femme fatale, hers is put to odd sentimental and ideological use in William A. Wellman’s The Iron Curtain of 1947, which is nonetheless a fascinating artifact of classic Hollywood anti-Communist propaganda and perhaps the first Cold War spy thriller.