Keeper of the Flame

An eerie war fever grips George Cukor’s 1942 propaganda thriller, “Keeper of the Flame.” A famous man has died in a thunderstorm when his car plunged from a washed-out bridge into a stony gorge. The great man was a hero of the Argonne Forest in World War One and he lives on a vast mountain-top estate in an expressionistic wilderness -- the milieu reminds me a little of the summit mansion, apparently on top of Mount Rushmore in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” Cyclopean walls surround dead hero’s manor and there are iron bars barricading the mountain streams that rush down from the canyons below the Berchtesgarten-like aerie. The nation mourns the great man and there is a montage of newspaper headlines and flags and, then, a disquieting shot of a huge crowd of mourners standing as motionless as statues in a downpour on the wet streets of a small city. Among the mourners and their soaking umbrellas, the camera picks out Spencer Tracy, a noble and fearless journalist, who has just returned from covering the war in Europe. We see the dead man’s widow emerge from a sinister-looking church, a rail-thin spike of a woman clad all in black. A malevolent giant (Forest Tucker who was later on TV’s “F Troop”) threatens the journalist and the assembled newspapermen scheme to sneak into the estate that is now closed to them. Tracy’s character makes an alliance with a sexy, and enterprising lady newspaper writer, and they share a hotel room as they connive to get the big story. (The sexy little romance between Tracy’s character and the appealing and sexy lady reporter is abandoned once the film goes into high dudgeon.) Tracy finds a way onto the hero’s estate, enters the courtyard of the dead man’s castle -- the doors are flanked by enormous sphinxes -- and, finally, meets the great man’s enigmatic wife played by a skeletal-looking Valkyrie of a woman, Katherine Hepburn. The dead hero’s name is Forrest, but he might as well be called Charles Lindbergh or Charles Foster Kane. The imagery in the first third of the film is Gothic, startling, and monumental -- everything is bigger than life: the silent crowds of mourners are immense and the wall surrounding the estate looks like the Great Wall of China (it is built with huge ashlars) and the gorge where the dead hero died is a dark ravine spiny with jagged rock and crooked trees that looks like something out of Dante. The décor in the dead man’s palatial manor is suffocating -- Chinese idols and massive bouquets of flowers and vases the size of teenage boys poised and glistening atop ebony pedestals. It’s like “Wuthering Heights” or “Jane Eyre” crossed with “Citizen Kane”, a wild fun-house with leering male secretaries, an insane old woman, and a limping, possibly murderous gamekeeper whose small son is feverish with guilt; the little boy blames himself for the hero’s death. Around the middle of the movie, however, the pace slows and long tendentious speeches paralyze the film. The dead hero’s name is Forrest and this should remind us of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Apparently, the great man was a crypto-fascist conspiring, like Charles Lindbergh, to not only keep America out of the War, but also planning to engineer a coup based on anti-Semitism, anti-Negro sentiment, as well as anti-Catholicism. The picture dissolves into febrile hysteria, messages take over and the whole thing becomes tedious and predictable. Katherine Hepburn, lit like the Bride of Frankenstein, trades long implausibly eloquent speeches with Spencer Tracy and, then, the movie ends in an alarming spasm of violence: lightning, fire, gun shots, rescuers wielding axes, and a man run over and crushed by a speeding automobile. Tracy tells the stunned world that the great man was really a traitor. There is patriotic music, another montage of newspapers and newspaper headlines, and, then, American flags borne in parade as armed multitudes take up arms and march. On the DVD, as an extra there is a fierce and wicked Tex Avery cartoon called “Blitz Wolf” that features a jocular sign that says “No Dogs Allowed” -- the word “Dogs” is crossed out and someone has written “Japs” over its letters. “Blitz Wolf” is savage and wildly surreal -- howitzers spurt bombs like ejaculating penises and, then, go flaccid, enemy shells are deterred by pin-up girl pictures and curl up in front of trenches where the cheesecake is displayed like obedient puppies. The sky is red with fire and huge cannons blast away at the darkness -- in one sequence, bombs erase Tokyo, imagined as a little Japanese tea-garden floating in an azure sea. It’s awful stuff to behold, but more honest, I think, then the genteel war hysteria throbbing beneath Cukor’s lusciously elegant black and white images in “Keeper of the Flame”.