Review: Keeper of the Flame (1942)
Posted by Alex Linder in movies, N.B. Forrest, reviews at 3:07 pm | Permanent Link
Keeper of the Flame
(1942)
Director: George Cukor
Screenwriter: Donald Ogden Stewart
Reviewed by:
N.B. Forrest
I saw this flick last night for the first time, and I felt moved to put fingers to plastic. It stars Spencer Tracy & Katherine “Pep-ridge Fahm” Hepburn, and is about Robert Forrest, a big national hero who dies in a car crash on a collapsed bridge. Tracy plays Steven O’Malley, famous journalist, and one of Forrest’s legion of admirers, who plans to write a biography of the untimely departed. After the funeral, he visits Forrest’s widow Christine (Hepburn) and tries to interview her; she declines and O’Malley leaves, but she’s convinced to “cooperate” by Forrest’s slimy fag of a private sectretary Clive Kerndon (Richard Whorf), who tells her that only by appearing to play along can they control the content of O’Malley’s bio.
So O’Malley asks his questions and sniffs around – and of course slowly falls in love with hatchet-face – but the street-wise reporter intuits that some big secret is being kept from him. Christine is the “keeper of the flame” of the title, striving to ensure that hubby’s golden reputation remains that way, so she shines O’Malley on, but naturally he keeps digging away. One day he asks about a small stone building on the property and is told by the froot that it’s just a storehouse called the Arsenal, when it was really Forrest’s office/library. O’Malley sneaks off to check it out for himself, but Christine sees him coming through the window and quickly steps outside to intercept him, locking the door. He asks her why smoke was coming out of the chimney and she says she was just burning old love letters. O’Malley says she might be depriving the world of something of historical interest; she replies “he didn’t write them to the world, he wrote them to me.” O’Malley let’s it go for the moment, but senses she’s lying. He begins to suspect that Christine was carrying on an affair with her cousin Geoffrey Midford, and that together they’d been responsible for Forrest’s death – but then Midford shows up with a fiance, which puts the kibosh on that theory.
And so it goes until O’Malley meets Christine in the Arsenal and confesses that he loves her, which induces her to finally come clean: when she married Forrest, he was the All-Ammuricun Hee-ro he appeared to be – but then the adulation of the masses eventually made him hold them in contempt, and come to a realization of his potential power over them. Ya see, folks, Forrest was a CRYPTO FASCIST: an evil bastid secretly undermining the foundations of Democwacy ‘n’ Fweedom, abetted by equally shadowy money-bags – why, he’d even been to Germany, by gum! Hepburn pulls files out of his safe detailing his stirring up people against the kike & the nig, against unions, setting the KKK and other groups against each other to produce the societal chaos that would allow him and his backers to take over.
I won’t spoil the ending for those who want to see it.
Tracy was believable as always (probably the greatest screen actor of them all), and Hepburn was Hepburn, but my real interest in this movie was the script, which I thought may well have been a kick in Charles Lindbergh’s balls (strong emphasis on the “hero” who ran an organization that “of course called itself true American”). The screenwriter was a Hollywitz commie puke named Donald Ogden Stewart who packed it full to bursting with his pinko bilge:
“I wrote an adaptation from a novel that tells about the fascist mice who are nibbling away at our country while we’re busy fighting a good war. Here was my compensation for the sabotage of my radical attempt to do my bit.”
Pardon me for a moment while I now symbolically piss on his grave, won’t you? ZIP! Whizzzzz….
The film did pretty well on the East Coast – especially, of course, in jew Yawk Shitty (a four week run at Radio City when most only got a week) but was a flop in Flyova.
Does this mean critics also think it was a flop? Aw HELL no. Martha Nochimson hails it as:
“Truly provocative in that it was one of Hollywood’s few forays into imagining the possibility of homegrown American Fascism and the crucial damage which can be done to individual rights when inhumane and tyrannical ideas sweep a society through a charismatic leader.”
Another crows that it was:
“…(an) astonishing…bold effort to shape American public opinion.”
Hey – here’s an ideer: how’s about we run the goddamn kikes through a grinder ‘n’ shape the stinky gefilte mince into dog coil-shaped piles?
29 October, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Not to detract from Spencer Tracy’s acting ability, nor from Hepburn’s – but, if I am not mistaken, both of these two liberal slabs of maggot dung were key players in the big list of Hollywood celebs who were outed as Communist sympathizers back during the Reds Over Hollywood expose that was done by Myron Fagan.
I always wondered about that, especially regarding Hepburn – because John Wayne, who was a well-known conservative and could even be considered a racist by modern day liberal definitions – used to cast her in a lot of his movies. I suppose Wayne did get a good deal of pressure from the jew studios and jew financiers to bring on certain actors or actresses that had once been on the blacklist – but, still, I always thought it odd that a super-patriot like the Duke would cave in, when a guy of his stature, i.e., the number one box office attraction almost every year until he died – would seem to have enough clout to fight these Communist rats.
I’m discounting, of course, the possibility that Hepburn might have been able to suck a golf ball through a 6 foot length of garden hose.
29 October, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Tracy was truly a great man in his field, but he made several anti-White films (Keeper of the Flame, Bad Day at Black Rock, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). That last – the ultimate cinematic monstrosity – is enough to blot his escutcheon forever. I don’t know the degree to which he was a leftist by personal conviction: I get the impression that strong-willed, dyed-in-the-wool-lefty-from-birth Yankee bitch Hepburn led him (especially as he slipped into decrepit old age); that bisexual Hollywood procurer that recently wrote a book “exposing” his star “friends” said that Hepburn was a dyke (big surprise there, huh?) and that Tracy was on the down-low (harder to buy).
30 October, 2012 at 12:20 am
super-patriot like the Duke? In what way was the socaled duke a patriot?
Wake up White Humans don’t believe this kind of crap.
30 October, 2012 at 2:27 am
You’ve obviously not spent much time researching your subject matter, bjt.
You will note that I never said that the Duke was openly jew wise, but according to the information that is available – he certainly was a very strong anti-Communist, and had some pretty unflattering opinions about liberals and leftists, in general. This was the case with a significant percentage of what used to constitute the ‘old right’. They quite vocally opposed just about every ideology that had jewish origins, but most could never quite bring themselves to name the jew as the source of the evils that they opposed.
Reading some of the statements that were made by Wayne and a number of other conservative celebrities of his era – one never quite knew for sure if these people were secretly ‘jew wise’ but, just trying to be careful in how they voiced their opposition to the jewish liberal agenda
in order to avoid seeing their celebrity careers end, or perhaps many of them just weren’t smart enough to connect the dots that would lead them to the jew behind the agenda they opposed.
If it’s available online, I would suggest that bjt locate a copy of the interview that John Wayne did with Playboy magazine and give it a read.
Once that remedial homework assignment has been completed, drop back by and tell us whether any modern day movie actor or actress could have expressed the right wing positions that Wayne did in that interview and not be put on the jews Hollywood black list.
30 October, 2012 at 7:58 am
What are you talking about Luke?
The duke, was a patriot only to fdr the duke got many, many White Humans
killed in WW2 the duke was a race traitor this is why the movie jews
let the duke ramble on and on about patriot’s.
And I take it you are a big fan of play boy magizne Luke?
30 October, 2012 at 8:04 pm
Funny how “The Duke” and “Dutch” Reagan never had to serve in WWII, like everyone else did. Yet they are always portrayed as conservative American “heroes”. The only John Wayne film I really like is “The Quiet Man”.
Wasn’t Kate Hepburn a Lesbian?
30 October, 2012 at 8:13 pm
Bjt, Playboy was a fairly respectable magazine at one time. They always had good interviews with interesting people like Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Sellers and Federico Fellini. They also had famous guest writers, like Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller (Jew), Vonnegut and Norman Mailer (Jew). The nekkid girls were just an enticement to buy the magazine, but were not the main part of it. Compared to the kind of SMUT you can see online nowadays those old airbrushed Playboy photo-spreads were PG-13.
31 October, 2012 at 10:49 am
I tell everyone that Puritanism and pornography are linked. Indeed, one might cause the other, and the other might cause the one.
Puritanism posits that not only is sex shameful, but that the body itself is shameful and corrupt. This shame acts like a magician’s cape tantalyzingly covering something which must not be mentioned, let alone seen. This mystery actually gives the subject of sex and nudity more power than it deserves, and allows money-making exploiters to capitalize on the fears of the populace.
Anyone who has been in a life-drawing class knows the sacredness of the body. So do medical personnel. Nudity is always tinged with a touch of sadness, sacredness and tenderness, and an awareness of human vulnerability.
I believe that it is Aryan artists themselves, such as Arno Brecker, who can and do rescue the body from religious-induced damnation and shame. Brecker’s sculptures, while idealistic, infuse pride and beauty into the Aryan form, while preserving the modesty of the viewer.
Pornography, on the other hand, has not idealism, symmetry, proportion, balance, etc. of the body, but a grossly exagerrated emphasis on certain body parts.
The Puritan/pornographee sees a woman’s breast and immediately thinks sex, in a berserk manner. A noble Aryan sees a woman’s breast and thinks, yes, I have desire for that (but not for this particular one, perhaps), but also desire to see Aryan children nourished from it; and I hope this young vulnerable woman finds a decent Aryan man who will cherish her and her children.
I tell everyone that breast-feeding is a noble thing, and should absolutely be allowed anywhere in public. I think this a actually a duty that our women owe to our young men–to let them see what breasts are for. It is also a duty for mothers to let their young sons see them naked, to see what a real woman looks like and to innoculate them against pornography.
31 October, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Sri Sreggin Das, Mystic Yogi of the Kali Yuga, that was absolutely beautiful. Truer words were never spoken
1 November, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Off-hand I can think of a million statements truer than that, but a dumber cliché there is none.
2 November, 2012 at 11:58 am
But Sri Das, why is it so hard for our women to find decent Aryan men?
2 November, 2012 at 1:03 pm
http://www.nnnforum.com/forums/showthread.php?p=479428#post479428
Number 1 mistake Richard M. Nixon and his straight White men advisers made that led to their own demise is the following.
All the hollywood and NYC media heads and with their underlings should have been arrested for sedition and given hard labor with for twenty years and then strict parole conditions and no media contact.
Dr. K. should have been deported to China.
The USS Liberty story should have been told to the public one day before going after the media and enemy aliens at large.
Nixon should have explained with over a half million White men in Viet Nam, that what the media was dong was hampering his strong to desire to end the War and leave.
Back then the majority of alphabet types would have been eager to help, and if Senator’s viewed Nixon shutting down all the networks and newspaper shit at the time, they would have helped in the majority.
Nixon needed to be ruthless to save US after the communist take over by FDR.
http://www.silentcoup.com/
Nixon and White people of the USA in 1969, did not have 80 millions savage anti Whites that we do today.
Nixon gave the left jooo’s every thing including the kitchen sink in the 1973 screw US war, and his reward was to hounded to the point of insanity.
Nixon never lashed out at the jooo’s again after being forced out office, and that day I say was the day we got total kike control of this regime.
Oy!
2 November, 2012 at 1:08 pm
All those who want to post negative’s about John Wayne are nothing more than soft handed deli taunts.
The man worked in a business full of anti White child rapping, White women murdering, and generally anti White destructive movies being made as the norm.
F U
2 November, 2012 at 2:13 pm
Doodoo, stop obsessing about the Jews and obey the precepts of Sri Das.
2 November, 2012 at 4:19 pm
http://www.silentcoup.com/overview.htm
4 November, 2012 at 4:41 pm
“stop obsessing about the Jews”
Interesting advice there, Queen.
4 November, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Yes, interesting advice that was presumably given in jest.
6 November, 2012 at 4:09 pm
The idea of the Holy is not a jest. The Light of the Holy scatters the Jews like the light of Glamdring scatters tge ircs.
7 November, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Luke: I don’t know where you get your info about John Wayne putting Hepburn in all of his movies. WTF?
Wayne and Hepburn only made one movie together and that was Rooster Cogburn in the l970’s. They got along famously, but they were both old by then. Hepburn always liked handsome men and was very enamored of Wayne. And Wayne liked her too. It’s actually one of my favorite movies, especially since there are so few good movies to watch.
Tracy was Catholic and wouldn’t divorce his wife because of this. His wife endured his cheating and basically lived her own life in Hollywood raising their deaf son. Tracy became an alcoholic through the years, and had a few affairs with a few actresses other than Hepburn. He had one with Ingrid Bergman before Hepburn and then again after he met Hepburn. He also had an affair with Grace Kelly.
Hepburn was just completely gaga over Tracy. She just went gaga over him from the first time they met on a movie lot and she adored him totally over the next thirty or so years until his death right after making Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I think on her part it was really hero worship.
Tracy wasn’t your typical handsome leading man type. I think Hepburn just thought he was sexy and unique and very talented, which he was. They were both consummate actors.
Tracy was an alcoholic all during their almost thirty year affair and Hepburn put up with a lot of abuse from him, but as I said, she just adored him and would have put up with anything to be near him. Hepburn was a definite lefty but she did take care of Tracy and made sure he didn’t descend into complete alcoholism.
She says he never told her he loved her and I believe that. Tracy was a tough guy, but I think he did care about Hepburn as they did stay together for almost 30 years. He died while at her house and she called his wife and stayed away from the public funeral so as not to create a public spectacle.
Back then, the press didn’t write about people if they were asked not to, and so the press pretty much left them alone. Their good friends were Ruth Gordon and her husband Garson Kanin–jews?) but when Gordon wrote a tell all book about Hepburn and Tracy, Hepburn ended the friendship.
Hepburn kept her mouth shut about Tracy during her life. Of course, they’re both dead now. Hepburn’s book mentioned him briefly but she kept their secrets and took them to the grave. Wish others would do the same.
John Wayne made a number of movies with Maureen O’Hara, maybe that is who you are thinking of instead of Hepburn. Way back in the ’30’s, Wayne made a few movies with Marlene Dietrich who was crazy about him. She thought he was just yummy.
Both John Wayne and Gary Cooper were two of the handsomest men back in those days.
Errol Flynn was my all time favorite though. What a waste of a life though as he descended into alcoholism and sleeping around too much until he alienated most of Hollywood and then was charged with rape. I read that when he died no one came to his funeral. What a shame. He was damn handsome in his youth. He and Olivia deHaviland made such a great couple in their movies together: Robin Hood, They Died With Their Boots On, Captain Blood.
Ah well, enough….
16 November, 2012 at 2:15 am
“Their good friends were Ruth Gordon and her husband Garson Kanin–jews?)”
Kanin was a kike, Gordon was not (I always thought she was until recently).
16 November, 2012 at 2:30 am
I wonder why Tracy was so down in real life. When Burt Reynolds was a young up-&-comer he met Tracy, and said Tracy told him that for him acting was easy; it was life that was hard. I’ve read that he blamed himself for his son’s deafness, believing that he’d caught some kind of venereal disease from a whore. Who knows what caused his inner turmoil, but you’d think that being rich, world-famous, celebrated as the greatest screen actor – and having bedded some of the most beautiful, lusted-after women on earth – would put SOME pep in your step…