Cloak and Dagger / Keeper of the Flame
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series From John Doe to Lonesome Rhodes: Anti-fascism From the Archive. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
Cloak and Dagger (1946)
Director Fritz Lang’s post-war espionage thriller follows Gary Cooper’s nuclear physicist from his lab working on the Manhattan Project to an Italian resistance unit on an OSS mission to rescue a dissident scientist forced to help the Nazis on their own atomic bomb. Lang delivers some outstanding action sequences (no one socks a Nazi quite like Gary Cooper) while later-blacklisted screenwriters, Ring Lardner Jr. and Albert Maltz, put a progressive spin on the film’s nuclear politics — “When are we going to be given a billion dollars to wipe out cancer?” decries Cooper’s physicist — alongside its message that resistance to fascism isn’t only necessary but a moral obligation.
Director: Fritz Lang. Screenwriters: Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz. With: Gary Cooper, Robert Alda, Lilli Palmer.
Keeper of the Flame (1942)
In this mystery melodrama, the legacy of a “great man” of America is called into question after his sudden death in a suspicious car accident. Spencer Tracy is the grizzled veteran reporter who starts asking all the wrong questions of Katharine Hepburn’s grieving but suspicious widow. Donald Ogden Stewart’s script comes with a few paeans to American exceptionalism — ”You and I are free men today because centuries ago some unknown guy got an idea in his head that he was just as good as the guy who was bossing him” — in a story that decidedly suggests “it can happen here” as homegrown fascists wrap themselves in patriotic imagery and rhetoric.
Director: George Cukor. Screenwriter: Donald Ogden Stewart. With: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Richard Whorf.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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