Looking at Gentleman’s Agreement’s gray, placid surface, you wouldn’t know that underneath is a seething, boiling stew of a sermon. At the pulpit: the Rev. Elia Kazan in full evangelistic fervor. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, there’s just about everything right with director Kazan’s full frontal assault on bigotry.
Made in 1947, Gentleman’s Agreement came two years after Kazan’s first big success (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and four years before the one which would garner him universal acclaim (A Streetcar Named Desire—a movie which seethes and boils on the surface). Gentleman’s Agreement was a critical and commercial success in its own right, of course, winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm).
Mention On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire to the average American moviegoer (i.e., the 19-year-old single female) and you’ll probably get some spark of recognition—fueled, perhaps, by the bloated reputation of Marlon Brando. But ask if they’ve heard of Gentleman’s Agreement and you’re likely to get a knitted brow and a thoughtful “Hmmmm…”
Indeed, I sometimes get this movie tangled up in my own mind with The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. No, that’s the other Gregory Peck flick where he plays the Noble Male.
It’s a shame Gentleman’s Agreement doesn’t have the kind of cultural response it once enjoyed. Today, more than ever, its message is necessary. For all the strides it prides itself on, America 2002 is not that distant from America 1947; our racism and xenophobia just wear a few more layers of lip gloss, that’s all. We’re getting better at attitude adjustment, but there still exists enough shame and prejudice for some groups—those with “Middle-Eastern-colored skin” or “sexually disoriented types,” for instance—to talk about themselves in whispers and murmurs in certain mixed company.
In post-World War Two, it was the Jews who thought “the less talk about it, the better” (as one prominent Jewish business leader in the movie puts it). “It” was the fact that, even though the Holocaust was still a fresh bruise, Jews were ostracized in the upper circles of American society (at least according to Gentleman’s Agreement’s script by Moss Hart, based on the novel by Laura Z. Hobson). Country clubs were closed, employers were discriminatory, real estate covenants (“gentleman’s agreements”) catered to Gentiles, schoolyard bullies picked on kids who went to synagogue. People with the last name Abrams (for instance) might try to assimilate by changing it to Adams.
Kazan himself was urged by studio moguls—who were themselves Jewish—to abandon Gentleman’s Agreement prior to the start of filming. The director and producers pushed past studio skittishness and even included a stinging rebuke to those studio chiefs in the aforementioned “less talk about it, the better” scene.
The movie opens with widower Phil Green (Peck) strolling in downtown New York with his son (played with charming naturalism by the young Dean Stockwell). Green, an award-winning journalist, has just arrived in the Big Apple and hopes to land a plum story assignment with a leading magazine (closely modeled on Life and Look). Phil’s a serious, humorless guy who seems to have assigned himself the task of rooting out injustice and oppression wherever he goes, be it hobo camps or coal mines. He’s just this side of Walter Winchell and Christ—not necessarily in that order. When he and his son stop—pointedly stop, I might add—in front of a statue of Atlas outside the magazine’s office, young Tommy says, “Grandma says you’re carrying the world on your shoulders.”
Phil’s about to add a half-ton more to that globe of his as the editor commissions him to write a piece on anti-Semitism—and not one with “the drool of statistics,” but a story that really gets to the heart of the matter. Phil spends the next twenty minutes wrestling over how to approach the subject before deciding to go undercover and pass himself off as “one of them” (one of the film’s first big flaws: he’s done this kind of investigative journalism before, so why doesn’t he immediately hit on the film’s central idea?).
He doesn’t know anyone in town and he’s got the stereotypical dark looks of a Jew, so why not use his middle name (Schuyler) and see what kind of discrimination he bumps up against? The editor claps him on the back. Brilliant!
And the movie is off and crawling.
On its gray, serene Truman-era skin, Gentleman’s Agreement creeps along, slowly gathering steam as Phil/Schuyler is greeted with guarded condescension by his co-workers at the magazine and outright hostility by the manager of an exclusive resort who suddenly finds no room at the inn for the non-Gentile. The movie most often resembles the equally-forgotten book Black Like Me (1961), in which white reporter John Howard Griffin undergoes pigmentation treatments to see what life is like in someone else’s skin. In that book, others also warn Griffin against “stirring things up.”
Kazan, of course, was a stirrer as well as a shaker and Gentleman’s Agreement, despite its too-tame demeanor, is admirably unflinching. Late in the movie, Phil offers this revelation:
I've come to see that lots of nice people who aren't [anti-Semites], people who despise it and deplore it and protest their own innocence help it along and then wonder why it grows. People who would never beat up a Jew or yell "kike" at a child, people who think that anti-Semitism is something that’s way off in some dark crackpot place with low-class morons. That's the biggest discovery that I've made about this whole business—the good people, the nice people.
One of those good, nice people is Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), his editor’s niece who originally suggested doing the story. With her genteel, upper-class manners, Kathy is the most insidious character in the film. Unfortunately, she’s also the one with whom Phil falls head over heels in love. He’s blind to her polite brand of bigotry, at first; but take a look at the reaction which quivers across her face when he starts to explain his story angle. “I’m just going to tell them I’m a Jew—” he declares. “Oh, but you’re not!” bursts from her lips before she can regain her composure. “I mean, you aren’t…are you?” I wish Phil had seized this moment and convinced Kathy of his façade, too—then he probably would have dumped her like a hot potato. Instead, he admits that, no, he’s not “one of them.” And the romance, so crucial to the movie, continues.
This is one of the film’s other flaws. Why on earth would Phil continue to romance the bland girl, especially after her mask slips, when he’s also being eyed by the vivacious, bigger-hearted fashion editor (Holm)? The answer is simple: Kathy serves as the chalkboard upon which Kazan sketches the play-by-play of How Not to Be a Bigot. Kathy represents the good, nice, wrong-headed people sitting in the theater seats in 1947 (and, truth be told, those watching from living room couches in 2003). Celeste Holm—so breezy, so cosmopolitan, so smart—is the obvious choice for Phil’s heart, but Dorothy McGuire must remain in the picture to illustrate the sermon.
Peck and McGuire play their roles with unwavering earnestness, which is so even-keel as to seem vacant. McGuire modulates every vowel of every line with such precision, there’s little room for true anguish when she reaches a crisis; and Peck, with his sonorous, trombone voice, recites dialogue like it was straight out of the Gettysburg Address. It’s up to the supporting cast to really bring this film alive—most notably, Celeste Holm, whose every scene feels like sparkling champagne; John Garfield as Phil’s Jewish friend Dave, who shows up two-thirds of the way through to deliver a couple of Important Messages; June Havoc as Phil’s secretary, a woman carrying her own secrets; and Anne Revere as Phil’s no-nonsense mother (in real life, Revere was only 13 years older than Peck).
20th Century Fox has just released Gentleman’s Agreement on DVD in its special Studio Classics line—a nice package which includes an American Movie Classics “Backstory” documentary on the making of the film, a couple of Movietone newsreels, a trailer (in which the movie’s subject is never mentioned, only that it’s “taboo”), and a scene-specific commentary by Time critic Richard Schickel, Havoc and a fragile-voiced Holm.
The handsome disc reminds us that Gentleman’s Agreement might not be Kazan’s most startling, or memorable, movie…but it’s still a sermon worth hearing.
A magazine writer poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism. Oscars for best picture, director Elia Kazan, supporting actress Celeste Holm.More at HotMovieSale.com
Director Elia Kazan and producer Darryl F. Zanuck caused a sensation with the most spellbinding story ever put on celluloid (Hollywood Reporter), reci...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.