Cloak and Dagger / Keeper of the Flame

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Cloak and Dagger

U.S., 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.

35mm, b&w, 106 min. Director: Fritz Lang. Screenwriters: Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz. With: Gary Cooper, Robert Alda, Lilli Palmer.

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by The Film Foundation.

Keeper of the Flame

U.S., 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.

35mm, b&w, 100 min. Director: George Cukor. Screenwriter: Donald Ogden Stewart. With: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Richard Whorf.

—Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm

Part of: From John Doe to Lonesome Rhodes: Antifacism from the Archive