(From his column in today's CounterPunch)
I watched George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame over the holiday weekend,
not expecting much, except for some snappy repartee between Hepburn and
Tracy. Tracy plays a reporter during the early days of WW2, who travels
to Maine to interview the widow of a Lindbergh-like American hero, who
has just died in a mysterious car crash. The film moves along pretty
briskly and conventionally until Hepburn opens a locked cabinet in her
husband’s office (an old arsenal from the Revolutionary War era), turns
to Tracy, who had been an admirer of her husband (Robert Forrest), and says:
“Here’s what I found. The key to Robert Forrest’s fascist
organization. Of course, they didn’t call it fascism. They painted
it red, white and blue and called it “Americanism.” In here are the
funds to see through, fantastic amounts subscribed by a few private
individuals, to whom $$ didn’t mean anything anymore, but who wanted
political power and they knew they could never get it through
democratic means. This was the essence of their plan. [She holds up
a folder.] Here are some articles ready for release to stir up all
the little hatreds of the whole nation against each other. [She
hands Tracy a sheet of paper.] This was an article to be published
in an anti-Semetic paper attacking the Jews. [She hands him another
sheet of paper.] This was to be used in the Farmer’s Gazette to stir
them up against city dwellers. Here’s one attacking the Catholics.
Anti-negro, anti-labor, anti-trade union, subtle appeal to the Ku
Klux Klan. Here’s a list of newspaper editors who either sought to
occupy public office or sought to dictate who should occupy public
office and when they failed, felt that the public was a great,
stupid beast. Here’s a list of men who served their country in the
last war and were failures in business and longed again for the
power of rank and the prestige of uniform. In there are the names
and addresses of the men designated to be America’s first storm
troopers. But what was really shocking to me was the cynicism of the
plan. Each of the groups was simply to be used until its usefulness
was exhausted. Hates were to be played against hates. If one group
got too powerful, it would be killed off by another group. And in
the end all these poor little people who never knew to what purpose
they were lending themselves would be in the same chains, cowed and
enslaved with Robert Forrest and his handful of power-thirsty
henchmen cracking the whip.”
Keeper of the Flame works as a story and a warning about patriotic
fervor. There’s tension, mystery social comedy and romance, though as
with most Tracy/Hepburn films, it is a find of flirtation devoid of
erotic charge. Cukor avoids flashbacks. We never see Forrest, except in
a brooding portrait above the fireplace which Hepburn and Forrest’s
assistant, a Goebbels-like character icily played by Richard Whorf, tend
like a shrine. The painting is a menacing presence long before we learn
Forrest’s evil secret.
Forrest rose from poverty, became a hero at the battle of the Argonne
Forest in WW I, and rode his medals to riches and national fame. At the
time of his death, Forrest lived in the Maine woods, but his was not a
Thoreauvian lifestyle. He and Hepburn resided inside a gated compound,
guarded by attack dogs and an Egyptian sphinx. Their Gothic mansion is a
cross between Hitler’s Berghof and Kane’s Xanadu.
There’s no tidy resolution to the film and Cukor was, reportedly,
disappointed with the finished product. But its ambiguity is one reason
why it continues to resonate. A film that raises red flags about the
corrosive nature heroism, charismatic leaders and compulsory patriotism
can’t have the uplifting ending common to so many other WWII era films.
You didn’t see much writing like that coming out of Hollywood in 1941.
And there wouldn’t be much more, either, at least under the writer’s own
name, David Ogden Stewart, since he and his wife, Ella Winter, who were
two of the founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, admitted joining
the Communist Party, were blacklisted and sought refuge in England,
where Stewart continued to work anonymously on screenplays for nearly 30
years, including writing some the best bits in Woody Allen’s send up of
Russian novels, Life & Death. As for his membership in the CP, Stewart
later said, “I didn’t want to stop dancing or enjoying the fun and play
in life. I wanted to do something about the problem of seeing to it that
a great many more people were allowed into the amusement park. My
new-found philosophy was an affirmation of the good life, not a
rejection of it.”
Stewart had gone to Yale, where he was rejected from Skull & Bones for
his radicalism. He became pals with Scott Fitzgerald and through
Fitzgerald became friends with Hemingway, who used him as the model for
Bill Gorton in/The Sun Also Rises./Stewart returned the favor in Keeper
of the Flame, basing Tracy’s journalist partly on Papa. Louis B. Meyer
attended the premier of Keeper of the Flame and was appalled at the
film’s leftwing message. According to Stewart, Meyer “walked out in a
fury, when he discovered, apparently for the first time, when the
picture was really about.”
Stewart never renounced his radicalism. In fact, he and Ella endorsed
the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers_and_Editors_War_Tax_Protest>”
pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
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