Watch Keeper of the Flame For Free

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

During the war years, the theme of fascism trying to get a hold in America is depicted in this film.An American hero dies in a car accident,and in trying to write about his life, reporter Spencer Tracy discovers some very interesting but troubling facts about the man, Robert Forrest. Along the way, he has to deal with the man's mysterious wife, Katharine Hepburn.Darryl Hickman is effective as the child who cries and whines about not being able to warn the guy about the weakness of the washed out bridge where the crash occurred.The film often is brooding and is hurt by the fact that it basically takes place at the mansion where the deceased lived with his wife.Richard Whorf steals the show as the fascist's secretary, willing to commit mayhem to silence those discovering what has been going on.

Spoiler Alert. After hearing about this film for years, I finally watched it tonight on TCM. For the comments about it having been an echo of "Citizen Kane" and a reference to William Randolph Hearst, it seems to me that the "great man" is based on Charles Lindbergh. After all, Lindbergh was the most admired public figure in the U.S. after the 1927 trans-Atlantic flight and then following the kidnapping and murder of he and Ann Morrow Lindbergh's son in 1935. But the kicker was Lindbergh's involvement, nay his leadership of the America First movement that cinches for me that Mr. Forrest's "great man" -- who is shown to have secretly been behind a conspiracy in the guise of a patriotic movement -- is meant to refer to Lindbergh.

When I was in high school a survey came out that the Baby Boomers didn't have heroes and that was considered a bad thing. I still think it is a very, very GOOD thing! Beware of the people you put up on a pedestal. Beware of people who care more about power than the truth. It is, sadly, extremely easy to manipulate the public, especially in times of turmoil or misery. Those are the lessons of this movie in a dramatic version of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.I found this movie to be deeply creepy because it was so plausible--the kids who voluntarily set up action groups they didn't know were going to be used for evil, the adults who wanted to get in on the action, the stirring up of hatreds, the impulse to not tell the public to "protect" them. Haunted houses and ghouls with chainsaws are nothing to me compared to the idea of people like this succeeding. The ideology doesn't matter. What matters is the power grab.

National hero Robert Forrest is dead. As America mourns, idealistic hack Stephen O'Malley (Spencer Tracy) arrives at the Forrest mansion, promising to do right by the heroic statesman with a comprehensive biog. That sounds reasonable, so why is Forrest's white-clad widow (Katharine Hepburn) acting so strangely? The film starts off fantastically, the first 30 bristling with energy and intrigue as sparks fly between reporter Tracy - just back from Berlin - and old flame Audrey Christie. There's some super interplay between the leads as well, and Tracy spouts spare, world-weary wisdom as only he can. But then Kate starts whispering behind closed doors to press agent Richard Whorf and it all falls apart. The blame really lies with Donald Ogden Stewart's script, which slips from wit, originality and humanism to cliché and blandness, though Cukor (Hepburn's favourite director) doesn't help matters by signposting all his plot twists.There's a good idea at the heart of this film, but it's lost in the muddled production. The effect is as if Tracy and Hepburn were offered four disparate projects and decided to film them all at once. Beginning with a sort of inspired cross between Citizen Kane and His Girl Friday, we traipse through tedious Gothic melodrama (the mid-section playing like a flabby Jane Eyre as the meeting with Forrest's mother just goes on and on and on), and wind up in a heavy-handed, unconvincing thriller, Hepburn frantically incinerating her late husband's papers. To my eyes, few films are "unintentionally hilarious", but there's a bit in the climax where Whorf bounces off the front of a car that's really badly handled and did elicit a slight chuckle. Considering the film's opening, I have to chalk up Keeper of the Flame as a major disappointment. Revel in the opening third, with its scintillating badinage and Percy Kilbride's hilarious supporting turn, but don't expect that momentum to last. By the final reels, there's just the performances to take solace in, as the screenplay loses the plot. Perhaps that's what Hepburn was chucking in the fire.