with all the art scraped off." Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, concluded that while the first half of the film was very good, the latter half felt slow and failed to deliver emotional punch. Crowther called the film "a courageous and timely drama" and praised Tracy and Hepburn for performances that featured "taut solemnity." But the script seemed uneven dramatically ("... the nature of this story is a murder mystery and yet the interest is centered much more upon the dead man than on the hunt"), and a critical problem was that the audience "is informed much sooner than the journalist what the nature of Forrest was, and the story drags while we wait for the journalist to catch up." Crowther still enjoyed Cukor's direction, which he felt sustained mystery even when little existed. Like Crowther, the Chicago Tribune and other critics pointed out that the picture seemed slow. The Hartford Courant, meanwhile, raved about the film: "Hepburn and Tracy have given us a great film in Keeper of the Flame ... Great because of the courage and daring it took to make it, the magnificent production it has been given, the excellent acting within it, and the exciting, tense story it contains." Generally speaking, the film was better received in the eastern half of the United States. Cukor himself was highly dissatisfied by the film. "I suspect the story was basically fraudulent," he told an interviewer. Like many critics, he felt that "as a piece of storytelling, the unfolding of a mystery, the first half of Keeper of the Flame is a damn good show," but the rest of the film had substantial problems. He praised Spencer Tracy's work, saying: "Tracy ... was at his best in the picture. Subdued, cool, he conveyed the ruthlessness of the reporter sent to investigate Forrest's death without seeming to try. He was ideally cast in the role, grimly and skeptically exploring the secret of the dead boys' club hero who was in fact a rampant fascist." Hepburn, he felt, was hindered by the role and her approach to it. "It was Kate's last romantic glamour-girl part, and she acted with some of that artificiality she'd supposedly left behind at RKO. That first scene, floating into a room in yards and yards of draperies with these lillies—well, it was all far, far too much. I don't think I really believed