Gentleman’s Agreement (1947): Eitan’s Take

Looking back on the two decades of films we have watched so far, a clear trend is emerging. About half of them are about characters too laid back to get caught up in the affairs of the world — the empty souls in Grand Hotel, the lame assholes in Cavalcade, Gable’s smarmy and aimless huckster in It Happened One Night, the play-it-cool grandaddy in You Can’t Take it With You, the low-key priest in Going My Way, and the domesticated folks of Mrs. Miniver and Best Years. The other half, the more important half, are about frustratingly obsessed, nearly egomaniacal people, driven to madness and extreme behavior by the stirring of a strange part of their souls — Yancey in Cimarron, Christian and Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, Flo Ziegfeld, Emile Zola, Scarlett O’Hara, Laurence Olivier and the maid in Rebecca, Don Birman in The Lost Weekend, and now Phil Green in Elia Kazan’s simplistic but ultimately rewarding Gentleman’s Agreement. 1947 was the height of Jewish involvement in Hollywood, and it’s no surprise that they picked a scathing and insightful film about anti-Semitism for the big prize. If the film came out today, I have no doubt it would still win. The obsession of Phil Green, played marvelously and with real craftmanship by Gregory Peck (swoon), is in cracking the hidden code of anti-Semitism and driving it out by exposing it not as a bigotry founded on false premises, but as a bigotry perpetuated by false and hypocritical enablers.

The film is too simplistic in its expectation that Mr. Green would automatically become the victim of endless acts and implications of hatred toward Judaism just because he mentions it ever so slightly in front of questionable company, and as a Jew and a longtime scholar of anti-Semitism, I think that the film fails to earn a total suspension of disbelief on my part. For one thing, Green never even comes to terms with potential rationale for anti-Semitism — even though there really is none, and anti-Semitism is almost 100% irrational, he should have at least questioned this once in the film — he merely decries it as the hobby of publicly decent/privately despicable white Christians, too comfortable with their own sense of superiority. The film also never mentions the Holocaust, which is just ridiculous. 6 million Jews mass murdered in the name of anti-Semitism just five years earlier, and nary a peep from the lips of any one of the characters (especially the wacky Jewish scientist and Phil’s pragmatic Jewish friend David)? Please. Not to mention the fact that this film, which purports to be and often succeeds at being a beacon of hope for a renewal of freedom and equality in America, was directed by a thuggish scumbag who sold out his own friends and colleagues by offering up names by the dozens during Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt. Kudos to him for crafting a smart and worthwhile script into a classy, humanistic, and insightful film about a religion he didn’t even belong to; shame on him for earning an Oscar for it and squandering its noble message for his own self-interest.

This worthwhile film, which mostly hits the mark, earns an 8/10

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947): Shira’s Take

Disclaimer: I’m sick and very tired, so this is probably all jumbly and nonsensical:

Meh. I’m sure this was much more relevant 60 years ago. But now, though I’m sure anti-Semitism exists in New York in one way or another, New York is SUCH a Jewish city. Everyone loves bagels and speaks Americanized Yiddish, and there are kosher delis on every block in Manhattan. To modernize it, instead of thinking about it in terms of anti-Semitism, I instead thought about it in terms of homophobia (probably inspired by the LOGO Presidential Forum we watched earlier this evening). Homophobia is still very relevant, especially in the way anti-Semitism was portrayed in this movie. The classic Seinfeld bit, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” defines the democratic homophobia of today just as, “Some of my best friends are Jewish,” was the democratic anti-Semitism of 1947. These people have no problem with Jews. Beyond that, they have a problem with people who DO have a problem with Jews. It’s just, they will never express that. And they will still have completely different expectations of Jews than Christians. Hell, I’m Jewish, and I stereotype Jews just the same. It seems silly to get into my political viewpoints on here, so I won’t.

It’s interesting how Elia Kazan made this progressive movie with a message about how everyone should be treated equally, but he sold out his friends during the Red Scare. It’s also interesting how at one point the concept of homosexuality was danced around (I don’t remember exactly what was said, but it was something subtle about how all the good men are either married or don’t like women). This is the second Kazan movie I’ve seen that dances around it, the other being A Streetcar Named Desire, which famously ignored Blanche’s husband’s homosexuality. On another Kazan-related note, I am seriously looking forward to On the Waterfront, which is totally better than Gentleman’s Agreement was.

Anyway, Gregory Peck pwned this movie, which gave it extra points in my book. I liked the character of his son, mainly because he showed the juxtaposition of educated adults (who end up prejudiced) against innocent kids (who have no reason to be prejudiced yet). In short, the movie was boring, but fine. Notes to myself: Nobody should ever start a sentence with the word darling. 7/10 (would have been 6, but I just love Gregory Peck so much)