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Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
Wow, what a fascinating movie. I can see why it made such a big splash and why it took home the Oscar for Best Picture. Elia Kazan’s film about anti-semitism is effortless and immediately involving. You get sucked into the story about a writer who takes on an assignment for a progressive New York magazine about the prejudice that still runs rampant against Jews and decides the best angle into this story, one that will reach more than already converted, is to pose as a Jew himself. Afterall, this writer, Philip Green, is new to the city and hasn’t made any of the social rounds yet. Who could tell his faith is a cover?
Gregory Peck plays Green and his fight against intolerance is a theme of Peck’s career. In fact, this movie reminded me a lot of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, no so much in story, but message.
What I think is frankly brilliant about this story is that it’s not a man against an evil, Nazi-like racist KKK world. We hear a couple of stories about kids calling another a kike or dirty jew, but we only get one instance in the movie where we’re shown that and even then it’s someone drunk and embarrassing his sober friends.
Instead, Kazan and screenwriter Moss Hart (from Laura Z. Hobson’s novel) focus on the latent racism or, even worse, passive indifference. There’s even a thread involving Peck’s secretary, Elaine Wales (June Havoc) who reveals that she had to send a false resume, without her very Polish real last name, in order to get hired onto the magazine that is running this editorial! Even in progressive New York, in this liberal magazine.
She reveals that and then, when Peck brings this to the attention of the editor-in-chief and brings about a change in that policy, she gets upset. She says that if they start hiring Jews that a “kikey one” will ruin it for the good ones. Wow! What a great character and the way Peck reacts to this is amazing, mixing both pity, revulsion, anger and sympathy in one look.
I can imagine making this movie these days and having it be much more in your face. Green would get threatened, his kid would be beaten up at school, his good friend, Dave Goldman (played by John Garfield), would be killed or hospitalized or something… you know, it’d be in your face and not under the skin.
The anti-Semitism Peck encounters is almost all that way, people helping perpetuate the stereotype even if they disagree with it. I keep going on and on and on about gray in this column, but it’s movies like GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT that make me want to sing out about how much I love complex characterizations, that gray area that you have in reality and is more often than not missing from entertainment.
And that’s not to say I think every movie should be gritty and real… but I love it when characters aren’t square pegs fitting neatly into square holes. In this movie, the only square peg is Peck and we need him to ground us, to be the shining light of decency to push through all the muddled bullshit.
Now, I don’t exactly subscribe to the theory proposed here, that if you joke about something that you’re perpetuating ignorance and hatred. I’m with George Carlin on this one. There are no such things as bad words. A word is just a word. It’s the context that is good or bad. Words like kike and nigger can’t be good or bad. But what can be is the racist asshole using them, or someone using the words in a way that knowingly hurts someone.
But you don’t have to agree with Peck. That’s one of the points of the movie, actually. There really aren’t any bad guys here, no skinheads or blatant racists. They leave that stuff to other movies. What they’re interested in here are the subtle ways racism and discrimination rear their heads.
The most fascinating and complex role in the film belongs to Dorothy McGuire’s Kathy Lacy, daughter of the editor-in-chief and, in fact, the one who suggested an article on anti-semitism in the first place. She is divorced and Peck is widowed, living with his mother and son. They hit it off and are engaged in pretty short order.
But when he tells her his angle to this story her face becomes mixed with emotion, the most prominent of them being fear. You can read that fear in many ways at first. She’s afraid for his safety, maybe. Or she could be afraid that he’ll be discovered or that his angle just won’t work. However, as the movie goes on you see that the fear is all about perception. She says it doesn’t matter to her if he’s Jewish or not and she means it… but what does matter to her is how society will look at her if they think her husband-to-be is Jewish, how her family will react, how this might impact her standing.
See, she’s not the prejudiced one. She doesn’t hold herself as being superior, but she’s letting her reputation and image in society make her complacent. She can feel good once or twice a year when she gets to vote against some bill or she can have a conversation about how she’s a friend to Jewish people and then spend the rest of the time protecting her standing.
Also great are John Garfield and Celeste Holm, the latter of whom received the Oscar for best supporting actress. Holm is the fashion editor who has her eye on Peck. They get along, but Peck’s heart belongs to McGuire and Holm, surprisingly, respects that. It’s not until tensions bubble over between the two (after a fantastic and emotionally brutal scene where she tries to console him after being called names by the neighborhood kids by telling him it’s not true that he’s Jewish, as if it would be a bad thing if he were… Peck really gets upset with her, accusing that same type of small comment that implants the kernal of racism into millions of childrens heads) that Holm finally comes clean with Peck in the scene that got her the Oscar.
John Garfield is in a small role as a good, long-time friend of Peck’s, an army man who has just landed a good job in NYC, but suddenly can’t find housing or apartments because of the titular “gentleman’s agreement” between those in upper scale communities. It’s not in any rule book, but there’s an understanding that only a certain type of people can get rent an apartment or home. As a result, Garfield is put into a situation where he’s going to have to leave a good, dream job behind because he doesn’t have a damn place to move his family in to.
I also want to point out Peck’s kid in the movie. As the two shared scenes, I was incredibly impressed with this child actor. He was very natural, likable and gives a performance beyond his years. I must have overlooked his name in the opening credits because it was a shock to me to find out after the movie was finished, when I was watching one of the docs on the disc, that the kid was in fact Dean Stockwell.
I’ve seen Stockwell’s work from this era, but I guess it was more when he was a teenager and not a little kid because I totally didn’t recognize him… I mean, it’s Al for god’s sake! Who didn’t want to be best friends with Al when they watched Quantum Leap?
Final Thoughts: It’s an incredible movie that coincidentally came out the same year as another movie about anti-semitism, a movie we previous covered in this very column called CROSSFIRE starring the great Robert Ryan. In the hour or so it has taken me to check up on my online stuff and write this review, this movie has already grown on me. I thought it was great upon first viewing, but as I reflect back on it I find I’m finding more and more to love about it. I highly, highly recommend this flick.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Saturday, November 29th: PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)
Sunday, November 30th: THE HOT ROCK (1972)
Monday, December 1st: WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
Tuesday, December 2nd: THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN (1973)
Wednesday, December 3rd: CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971)
Thursday, December 4th: THE CINCINNATI KID (1965)
Friday, December 5th: POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES (1961)
Tomorrow we follow director Elia Kazan over to PANIC IN THE STREETS and I also plan on catching up on the AMAD I’m behind tomorrow as well, so expect to see a one-two punch of PANIC IN THE STREETS and THE HOT ROCK! See you then!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Previous Movies:
June 2nd: Harper
June 3rd: The Drowning Pool
June 4th: Papillon
June 5th: Gun Crazy
June 6th: Never So Few
June 7th: A Hole In The Head
June 8th: Some Came Running
June 9th: Rio Bravo
June 10th: Point Blank
June 11th: Pocket Money
June 12th: Cool Hand Luke
June 13th: The Asphalt Jungle
June 14th: Clash By Night
June 15th: Scarlet Street
June 16th: Killer Bait (aka Too Late For Tears)
June 17th: Robinson Crusoe On Mars
June 18th: City For Conquest
June 19th: San Quentin
June 20th: 42nd Street
June 21st: Dames
June 22nd: Gold Diggers of 1935
June 23rd: Murder, My Sweet
June 24th: Born To Kill
June 25th: The Sound of Music
June 26th: Torn Curtain
June 27th: The Left Handed Gun
June 28th: Caligula
June 29th: The Elephant Man
June 30th: The Good Father
July 1st: Shock Treatment
July 2nd: Flashback
July 3rd: Klute
July 4th: On Golden Pond
July 5th: The Cowboys
July 6th: The Alamo
July 7th: Sands of Iwo Jima
July 8th: Wake of the Red Witch
July 9th: D.O.A.
July 10th: Shadow of A Doubt
July 11th: The Matchmaker
July 12th: The Black Hole
July 13th: Vengeance Is Mine
July 14th: Strange Invaders
July 15th: Sleuth
July 16th: Frenzy
July 17th: Kingdom of Heaven: The Director’s Cut
July 18th: Cadillac Man
July 19th: The Sure Thing
July 20th: Moving Violations
July 21st: Meatballs
July 22nd: Cast a Giant Shadow
July 23rd: Out of the Past
July 24th: The Big Steal
July 25th: Where Danger Lives
July 26th: Crossfire
July 27th: Ricco, The Mean Machine
July 28th: In Harm’s Way
July 29th: Firecreek
July 30th: The Cheyenne Social Club
July 31st: The Man Who Knew Too Much
August 1st: The Spirit of St. Louis
August 2nd: Von Ryan’s Express
August 3rd: Can-Can
August 4th: Desperate Characters
August 5th: The Possession of Joel Delaney
August 6th: Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx
August 7th: Start the Revolution Without Me
August 8th: Hell Is A City
August 9th: The Pied Piper
August 10th: Partners
August 11th: Barry Lyndon
August 12th: The Skull
August 13th: The Hellfire Club
August 14th: Blood of the Vampire
August 15th: Terror of the Tongs
August 16th: Pirates of Blood River
August 17th: The Devil-Ship Pirates
August 18th: Jess Franco’s Count Dracula
August 19th: Dracula A.D. 1972
August 20th: The Stranglers of Bombay
August 21st: Man, Woman & Child
August 22nd: The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane
August 23rd: The Young Philadelphians
August 24th: The Rack
August 25th: Until They Sail
August 26th: Somebody Up There Likes Me
August 27th: The Set-Up
August 28th: The Devil & Daniel Webster
August 29th: Cat People
August 30th: The Curse of the Cat People
August 31st: The 7th Victim
September 1st: The Ghost Ship
September 2nd: Isle of the Dead
September 3rd: Bedlam
September 4th: Black Sabbath
September 5th: Black Sunday
September 6th: Twitch of the Death Nerve
September 7th: Tragic Ceremony
September 8th: Lisa & The Devil
September 9th: Baron Blood
September 10th: A Shot In The Dark
September 11th: The Pink Panther
September 12th: The Return of the Pink Panther
September 13th: The Pink Panther Strikes Again
September 14th: Revenge of the Pink Panther
September 15th: Trail of the Pink Panther
September 16th: The Real Glory
September 17th: The Winning of Barbara Worth
September 18th: The Cowboy and the Lady
September 19th: Dakota
September 20th: Red River
September 21st: Terminal Station
September 22nd: The Search
September 23rd: Act of Violence
September 24th: Houdini
September 25th: Money From Home
September 26th: Papa’s Delicate Condition
September 27th: Dillinger
September 28th: Battle of the Bulge
September 29th: Daisy Kenyon
September 30th: Laura
October 1st: The Dunwich Horror
October 2nd: Experiment In Terror
October 3rd: The Devil’s Rain
October 4th: Race With The Devil
October 5th: Salo, Or The 120 Days of Sodom
October 6th: Bad Dreams
October 7th: The House Where Evil Dwells
October 8th: Memories of Murder
October 9th: The Hunger
October 10th: I Saw What You Did
October 11th: I Spit On Your Grave
October 12th: Naked You Die
October 13th: The Wraith
October 14th: Silent Night, Bloody Night
October 15th: I Bury The Living
October 16th: The Beast Must Die
October 17th: Hellgate
October 18th: He Knows You’re Alone
October 19th: The Thing From Another World
October 20th: The Fall of the House of Usher
October 21st: Audrey Rose
October 22nd: Who Slew Auntie Roo?
October 23rd: Wait Until Dark
October 24th: Dead & Buried
October 25th: A Bucket of Blood
October 26th: The Bloodstained Shadow
October 27th: I, Madman
October 28th: Return to Horror High
October 29th: Die, Monster, Die
October 30th: Epidemic
October 31st: Student Bodies
November 1st: Black Widow
November 2nd: The Ghost & Mrs. Muir
November 3rd: Flying Tigers
November 4th: Executive Action
November 5th: The Busy Body
November 6th: It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World
November 7th: Libeled Lady
November 8th: Up The River
November 9th: Doctor Bull
November 10th: Judge Priest
November 11th: Ten Little Indians
November 12th: Murder On The Orient Express
November 13th: Daniel
November 14th: El Dorado
November 15th: The Gambler
November 16th: Once Upon A Time In America
November 17th: Salvador
November 18th: Best Seller
November 19th: The Holcroft Covenant
November 20th: Birdman of Alcatraz
November 21st: The Train
November 22nd: Gunfight At The O.K. Corral
November 23rd: Mystery Street
November 24th: Border Incident
November 25th: The Tin Star
November 26th: On The Beach
November 27th: Twelve O’Clock High
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