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
