Keeper of the Flame (1943)

(On Cable TV, April 2019) Cukor, Hepburn, Spencer—it didn’t take much more than that to get me watching Keeper of the Flame without even taking a look at the plot description or any of the material about the film. I just knew that I’m on my way of seeing all of the nine Hepburn/Spencer movies (this being my sixth) and also (eventually, maybe) seeing all of George Cukor’s films. If you were expecting a romantic comedy, the first minute of the film will set you straight as a famous man dies in a car crash and the entire nation mourns. Tracy Spencer plays a journalist who wants to get the story behind the death, his primary objective being meeting the deceased’s widow (Katharine Hepburn). What he discovers will go far beyond anything he (or we) could have imagined. The film is structured along the lines of a mystery, with enough sombre hints to get us hooked on the promise of something sinister. Hepburn is at her best here: still looking like a gorgeous ingenue, but acting with the strong will of her later matronly roles. But I defy anyone from guessing how the film ends. By the time it does, the female lead effectively becomes the woman who looked forward in time and stopped American fascism in the nick of time. The second half of Keeper of the Flame does have issues: the romantic drama slows down, and the delivery of the film’s secret is done through a ham-fisted fashion that weighs down the film’s laudable intentions and daring premise with inelegant exposition that never stops unspooling well after the point is made and too densely to be satisfying—certainly more could have been done to prepare viewers for the revelations. Keeper of the Flame remains relevant well after it served its purpose as an anti-fascism call to arms against the axis, and its lack of contemporary success can be squarely attributed to the public revulsion at even considering the possibility of homegrown American fascism. We twenty-first century viewers know better.