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An intriguing work from George Cukor, written by Donald Ogden Stewart, who, wittingly or not, repeats elements of his script for The Philadelphia Story in an urgently different context, presenting Spencer Tracy as the idealistic journalist who gains access to the mansion on the hill, but instead of kooky Brahmins, uncovers arrogance, conspiracy, and treachery.
Tracy’s journalist, Stephen O’Malley, a compound of William Shirer and Edward Murrow, has recently returned from Europe haunted by visions of dictatorship and genocide, in time to get in on the orgy of mourning that follows the death of Robert Forrest, a magnate, essayist, publisher, and promoter of “Americanism”, famed for his “simple, homespun, Lincolnesque” qualities, suggesting, in the way people talk about him, a mixture of Will Rogers, Charles Foster Kane, and Ayn Rand. O’Malley sets out initially to celebrate a real cultural hero, but as he digs begins to smell a rat, when he comes into close contact with the people who surrounded him, including his troubled wife Christine (Katherine Hepburn), who’s pushed to work with O’Malley by the unnervingly devoted and perspicacious secretary, Clive Kerndon (Richard Whorf). O’Malley and Christine begin a wary, not-quite-romantic pas-de-deux, until the rat, it becomes clear, is the nature of power and hero-worship, infected by a dose of Fascism, as Christine finally reveals to O’Malley that her husband had become convinced of his own superiority, and wanted to bring pseudo-Nazi rule to America.
Keeper plays like a generic rewrite of Citizen Kane (1941), whilst making a more specifically contemporary and focused – and more paranoid – statement about the dangers of handing too much trust to individuals garbed in laurels of triumph, both patriotic and capitalistic. It plays out, however, more under the influence of Hitchcock, evoking Rebecca (1940) in the sense of Forrest’s vast estate, filled with little cottages and remote houses containing more than one closeted skeleton, and, like his Saboteur (1943), looking for threats in picturesque places (all three films evoke hushed forests and cavernous mansions as breeding grounds of inequity and dissolution). You know when you see the stone sphinxes that line the Forrest’s gated driveway that something’s rotten in the state of Vermont
Thanks to Hepburn’s conniving with Louis Mayer behind the scenes, the political themes were subordinated to a go-nowhere romance, and Cukor did not have the gifts of Welles or Hitchcock for sustaining the tension of moral drama. And so Keeper doesn’t quite work as a thriller, romance, or a cautionary drama, too cautious for the former and too generic for the latter. But the themes it evokes are still of vital relevance, as equates spin doctoring and blind patriotism as potential tools for dictatorship in equal degree, and asks interesting questions: is image more important than truth in a time of war? How much power do we cede to opinion makers and figures of moral authority? What is the nature of heroism in a democratic society? Timely indeed. The film only truly stumbles right at the end, with a tacked-on bit of villainy from Whorf to provide an uninspired climax, and a final, silly proposition to replace one false martyr with another.