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| KEEPER OF THE FLAME (1942) |
A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture
B&W, 100 minutes
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CAST
Steven O'Malley: Spencer Tracy
Christine Forrest: Katharine Hepburn
Clive Kerndon: Richard Whorf
Mrs. Forrest: Margaret Wycherly
Mr. Arbuthnot: Donald Meek
Freddie Ridges: Horace (Stephen) McNally
Jane Harding: Audrey Christie
Dr. Fielding: Frank Craven
Geoffrey Midford: Forrest Tucker
Orion: Percy Kilbride
Jason Rickards: Howard Da Silva
Jeb Rickards: Darryl Hickman
Piggot: William Newell
John: Rex Evans
Anna: Blanche Yurka
Janet: Mary McLeod
William: Clifford Brooke
Ambassador: Craufurd Kent
Messenger Boy: Mickey Martin
Reporters: Manart Kippen, Donald Gallaher, Cliff Danielson
Men: Major Sam Harris, Art Howard, Harold Miller
Pete: Jay Ward
Susan: Rita Quigley
Auctioneer: Dick Elliott
Lawyer: Edward McWade
Boy Reporter: Irvin Lee
Girls: Diana Dill (Diana Douglas), Gloria Tucker
Minister's Voice: Dr. Charles Frederick Lindsley
Tim: Robert Pittard
Gardener: Louis Mason
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CREDITS
Director: George Cukor
Producer: Victor Saville
Associate Producer: Leon Gordon
Scenarist: Donald Ogden Stewart
Based on the Novel by: I.A.R. Wylie
Photographer: William Daniels
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Associate Art Director: Lyle Wheeler
Set Decorator: Edwin B. Willis
Associate Set Decorator: Jack Moore
Editor: James E. Newcom
Sound Recorder: Douglas Shearer
Musical Score: Bronislau Kaper
Costumer: Adrian
Makeup Artist: Jack Dawn
Special Effects: Warren Newcombe
Assistant Director: Edward Woehler
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SYNOPSIS
Steven O'Malley, a noted correspondent just back from Europe, is sent by his newspaper to write a story on the death of Robert V. Forrest, an American national hero. Christine Forrest, the widow, is unapproachable and the dead man's secretary, Clive Kerndon, behaves suspiciously. O'Malley overhears a conversation between Christine and Jeb Rickards, the son of the gateman, which convinces him she played a part in her husband's murder. He accuses her of having killed her husband and says he must write his story despite his love for her.
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CRITIQUES
"Keeper of the Flame is an expensive testimonial to Hollywood's inability to face a significant theme, i.e. that Fascism might offer itself to the U.S. behind a handsome and disarming face....For stars Hepburn and Tracy and all concerned, it is the high point of a significant failure."
- Time, 1942
"Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either. She plays the widow of a 'great American'; Tracy is a journalist admirer of the dead man who wants to write the definitive biography. The widow won't cooperate with him and puts obstacles in his path because she's trying to conceal the fact that her husband was the secret head of a traitorous Fascist organization. The screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart, had become very political during the war years, and he seems to have felt it incumbent on him to stuff the script (based on I.A.R. Wylie's novel) with anti-Fascism. Tracy is monotonous, and Hepburn looks beautiful but suffers all over the place and speaks mournfully, like a spiritualist's medium. It's a gothic wet blanket of a movie, directed by George Cukor, with an impressive, wasted cast."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"The flame that Katharine Hepburn keeps is for the memory of her late husband, a millionaire industrialist-politician whom reporter Spencer Tracy is trying to debunk. In spite of the chemistry - Hepburn, Tracy, and director George Cukor - this is a curiously flat melodrama that redeems itself only from moment to moment."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
"Bizarre political melodrama which has its eye firmly glued on Citizen Kane as Tracy's reporter arrives at another Xanadu, gleans another mess of information for his biography of a Great American Citizen who has died in mysterious circumstances, and learns - having fallen for the widow (Hepburn) whose reticence he misinterprets - that his hero had feet of Fascist clay. It works well if rather stiffly for a while, with excellent performances (Wycherly and da Silva are outstanding), but blows up into absurd histrionics and naive propaganda."
- Tom Milne, Time Out
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COMMENTARY TRACK
"It was Kate's last romantic glamour-girl part, and she acted with some of that artificiality she'd supposedly left behind at RKO. That first scene, floating into a room in yards and yards of white draperies with these lilies - well, it was all far, far too much. I don't think I really believed in the story, it was pure hokeypokey, and her part was phony, highfalutin. She tried to make something of her haughty lines - 'I had visioned,' and so on. But it was very much a
Christopher Strong performance; she was always coming on in something glittering in that one and delivering long theatrical speeches, and now she was doing it again. I didn't like the 'glamour' side of Kate; I loved the fresh, natural Kate, when she forgot to be a movie queen. The subject brought out the movie queen in her, and that wasn't good. And we should have done the picture on location. We did it on the sound stage, fir forests, mansions, lodges in the grounds, mysterious gates. Everyone looked like a waxwork in Madame Tussaud's."
- George Cukor
"I thought this picture opened in a most interesting way, with a lot of visual detail. And yet it wasn't very satisfactory as a whole. I don't know why. It was really very well done, but I suspect the story was basically fraudulent."
- George Cukor, interview with Gavin Lambert, 1970
"I think she [Hepburn] finally carried a slightly phony part because her humanity asserted itself, and her humour. They always did. At the start her career could have gone one way or another. After A Bill of Divorcement she made something called Christopher Strong and wore tight, glittering dresses. Then she did Little Women, dropping the glamour girl thing and showing the touching idealistic side of herself. It's fascinating to watch what happens to people."
- George Cukor, interview with Gavin Lambert, 1970
"It was an anti-fascist picture at a time nobody knew very much about fascism. It was of great concern to Kate, with her left-wing ideals - later on in the forties, she spoke up for Henry Wallace for president, and he certainly wasn't what you might call the people's choice."
- Donald Ogden Stewart
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HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
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Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy
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Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn
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Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy
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Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy
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Katharine Hepburn, Donald Meek
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