*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the novel by Laura Z. Hobson
directed by Elia Kazan
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Gentleman’s Agreement is a painful film to sit through. Not only is its construction long-winded and lopsided, not only is its look only marginally more attractive than life insurance fine print, but it is part of that horrible genre of liberal “message” movies that haunts us to this day. I’d like to say that post-post-modern cynicism has rendered it obsolete, and thus quaint and unthreatening, but what angered me most about it was that its particular strain of self-satisfaction continues to ravage the Hollywood corpus. Rather than depict the cruelty of prejudice, the film is determined to give the audience untouched by prejudice something over which to feel superior, and it acts as a model for all the cynical do-gooding fools who have followed in its wake.
The film is not, as advertised, about the horrors of anti-Semitism, but about Gregory Peck acting as a heroic proxy for the non-Jewish audience. Peck plays Philip Green, a journalist wrestling with whether or not he should do an article on the problem for a liberal Harper’s–style monthly. And how he wrestles! A full forty minutes of running time are committed to his struggling with the pros and cons, and how he should go about the job; the dead air gives us plenty of time to wonder what, exactly, is being taught through the spectacle of a Gentile journalist niggling over methodology. At last, after the movement of several glaciers, he hits upon the brilliant idea to “pass” as Jewish in order to feel what it’s really like, setting the would-be shocking events into motion.
Only there are hardly any real Jews to offset him. Aside from one self-hater Green (now “Greenberg”) meets at a party, it takes an hour and ten minutes to get a solid Jewish speaking part into the film–and it turns out that war buddy Dave Goldman (John Garfield) is largely there to offer support to the super-goy martyr hero. Sure, he throws the odd punch at the odd trash-talking drunk, but his purpose is to bolster Green’s cause, and seem sad and stoic so that Green can have a plight to expose. And so Green hogs the spotlight as he suffers one indignity after another, causing second thoughts about his betrothed Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), who tacitly accepts the anti-Semitism that goes on under her nose.
It’s not just a matter of bad dramaturgy. True, Moss Hart’s screenplay gets low marks for economy, dragging everything out in tired exchanges and statements of the obvious. And yes, director Elia Kazan creates zero ambience with his low-contrast cinematography and its grey-on-grey boredom. But the film is thematically unsound for the reason that it never comes to terms with the people it’s supposed to be defending. According to Gentleman’s Agreement, Jewishness is largely a matter of not being Gentile, and being ostracized; under such circumstances, Gregory Peck can “pass” as a Jew and be equal to the real thing. But Judaism has a long and vibrant cultural history that the movie never gets around to acknowledging, because Jews have to be “just like us” in order to be given pity privileges. And in the end, it winds up suppressing the things that make a Jew a Jew so that they might be more acceptable to a Gentile audience–not, you’ll agree, a satisfactory shortcut to tolerance and goodwill.
Maybe I’m coming at this from the wrong angle; maybe it was good that this was the first Hollywood film to deal with the subject, and maybe it’s churlish to attack a “classic” film for not learning modern lessons. But the fact remains that first doesn’t necessarily mean best, or even good, and that current films haven’t learned those lessons, either. If anything, its smug self-satisfaction is more rampant than ever, explaining how a limp noodle like Driving Miss Daisy became the life of the party while Do the Right Thing was left wanting for mainstream awards. Hollywood can’t be racist, they say–didn’t Halle Berry win an Oscar? And so we have to see Gentleman’s Agreement as we see Berry’s Oscar: as crumbs from the table, an indulgence paid for by those with guilty consciences so that they might sin all the more in the future.
THE DVD
There seems to be an ironic rule of thumb: the more stale the picture, the better it has kept. With half the restoration effort, Gentleman’s Agreement looks twice as good in Fox’s Studio Classics reissue as this month’s DVD release of Nicholas Ray’s timeless 1950 melodrama In a Lonely Place. The full-frame image is crisp like a pressed suit and absent of most age-related artifacts such as ground-in dirt. The remixed stereo audio doesn’t sound reprocessed. Extras include a film-length commentary headlined by TIME reviewer Richard Schickel (author of a self-described “book on Elia Kazan”) but also featuring actresses June Havoc and Celeste Holm, the latter an Academy Award winner for her work in Gentleman’s Agreement.
All involved do more watching than talking, and Schickel’s observations–few of which you couldn’t make on your own–suggest he’s suppressing his critical facilities out of polite posterity: he invites appreciation of Kazan’s tendency to attenuate every entrance and exit a character makes without calling it on its staginess. AMC’s “Backstory: Gentleman’s Agreement” (24 mins.) substitutes a discussion of the anti-Semitic climate surrounding the release of the film with one about the HUAC witch hunt (any old form of oppression will do)–there’s nothing here you haven’t heard a thousand times elsewhere. “Movietone” segments cover Gentleman’s Agreement‘s Oscar reception and, separately, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s victory speech at the ceremony. Trailers for Gentleman’s Agreement, How Green Was My Valley, and All About Eve round out the disc.
118 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo), English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
