Keeper of the Flame is a 1943 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) drama directed by George Cukor, and starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
The screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart (noted Hollywood Communist Party member) is adapted from the novel Keeper of the Flame by I. A. R. Wylie. Stewart considered the script to be the finest moment of his entire career, feeling vindicated by the assignment as he believed that Hollywood had punished him for years for his Stalinist political views.
The film was screened for the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures on December 2, 1942, where it was disapproved of by the Bureau’s chief, Lowell Mellett. Keeper of the Flame premiered to a poor reception at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, March 18, 1943. MGM head Louis B. Mayer stormed out of the cinema, enraged by his having encouraged the making of a film which equated wealth with fascism. Republican members of Congress complained about the film’s obviously leftist politics, and demanded that Will H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Production Code, establish motion picture industry guidelines for propaganda. Cukor himself was highly dissatisfied by the film and considered it one of his poorest efforts.
Nonetheless, today the film is seen more positively, with one critic concluding that Keeper of the Flame is “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.”
Keeper of the Flame is not Donald Trump’s favorite movie.
7:35 pm on June 26, 2016
