AT one point in the new Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn movie the widow of the great American patriot, Robert Forrest, floats angelically into a room and poignantly places lilies before her late husband’s portrait. At the end of the picture she tells you she had hated her husband so thoroughly and was so sure he threatened the freedom of a whole nation, that she murdered him without a pang.
“Keeper of the Flame” is disconcerting and irresponsible in this way. There is before you throughout the movie the bewildering paradox of Spencer Tracy, an ace reporter: stern and compassionate in his search for truth; yet actually blind as a bat and taken in at every turn. As a reporter he had witnessed the rise to power of the Fascists in Italy, Germany and Spain, and he was determined to fight to prevent the same thing from happening in this country. But he couldn’t recognize an American fascist when he was shown one with all the trimmings. He was writing a hero-worshiping biography of Robert Forrest, without a suspicion that Forrest was not quite another Lincoln. He was oblivious of the fact that Forrest, at the moment of his death, was about to stage a good old Nazi putsch and set himself up as a dictator with storm-troopers, youth groups and race laws. There is then, behind the movie, this tricky proposition: that our native fascists hide their fascistic ideas from the people in order to rise to powerful positions, that such ideas can be hidden, and that when they are there is no way of telling a fascist from a democrat, since no one in this picture (not even The New Republic) suspected what Forrest was up to.
This MGM portrait of a native fascist starts at his death. What you find out about him comes out after an hour and twenty-five minutes of fencing, in a sort of formless, impotent detective story. Steve O’Malley, the just reporter, in nosing around Forrest’s estate to get material for his biography, finds a sullen gatekeeper who limps and knows something; Forrest’s insane mother, whom no one knew about and who had been hidden away by someone for some reason; the gatekeeper’s boy, who was ill because he thought he had killed Forrest; the gatekeeper’s daughter, whom someone had put into a sanitarium; a sulky brother-in-law who threatens to thrash O’Malley; and the wife who murdered her husband so as not to destroy the nation’s illusion that he was their hero. At the end, with most of these not ordinary lives full of sinister behavior unaccounted for (the disturbing personality enters the picture, threatens to disclose something and vanishes, leaving a cloud behind, and another such personality appears), there is a long and boring monologue which does explain Forrest, but in the dullest movie way possible. The picture then immerses itself in Grade-C melodrama; the Hays Office has a ruling that the wife who murders her husband doesn’t live: so Miss Hepburn doesn’t live.
Cinematically, most successful are some shots taken during Forrest’s funeral, which strike close to the more frigid, lifeless parts of American life in the same way some Grant Wood paintings do. Margaret Wycherly’s performance as Forrest’s insane mother, who hears her son’s voice, does more in its brief span to indicate what kind of man Robert Forrest was, and why, than all the rest of the characters, who always threaten to but never do. The part of Forrest’s secretary, who is about six miles past being a mere opportunist and a mere hypocrite, is written well, and with insight.
The movie throughout gets into interesting situations which don’t materialize or stay interesting either; nevertheless it keeps you in your seat, and it is justified in cautioning us against the kind of person Forrest was. But such a vital problem as an American fascist and the reaction of the people to him would seem to call for less romanticizing and more attention to what an American fascist really is, and how he gets there.
March 8, 1943