Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 30-January-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

We conclude this month's series on impostor movies* with a twist, a story in which the impostor assumes a false trait instead of a false identity. It makes for a humdinger of a situation, as widowered father Phil Green (Gregory Peck) starts his job at a New York magazine by tackling a series on anti-Semitism. After much deliberation, Phil decides that the best way to approach this topic is to experience it on his own. So he tells his new acquaintances in the city that he is Jewish and settles back to record the effects.

Because it came out in 1947 (the same year as the book that inspired it), one might suppose that Gentleman's Agreement preached to the choir, i.e., an American audience strongly aware of the victory and significance of World War II. But just as the Civil War wasn't about freeing slaves, WWII wasn't about saving Jews, and anti-Semitism was apparently still rampant. The movie's message created quite a stir and generated big box office at its release. Bypassing overt bigots, it takes aim at people who enable bigotry despite good intentions. It also emphasizes that such bigotry isn't a Jewish issue but a national one, since any form of injustice undermines the American ideal.

Peck is renowned for playing an enemy of prejudice in To Kill a Mockingbird, but his finest moment may come in this film with a character who expresses frustration more vehemently than Atticus Finch. Phil builds up to this moment over several weeks as he sees manifestations of racism he never imagined. His Jewish secretary expresses disdain for her heritage as she tries to conform to the expectations of gentiles. His Jewish best friend, a veteran and solid family man, can't find a place to live in a city with tons of rentals open to WASPs. (The friend is played by John Garfield, who was born Jacob Garfinkle and changed his name to go into pictures.) Hardest of all, Phil becomes engaged to a socialite (Dorothy McGuire) who regards his pretense of Jewishness as distasteful and inconvenient. She shares his disgust of racism, or so she claims, but her response is to criticize it in private with like-minded people so as to avoid making waves. When Phil's young son (Dean Stockwell) comes home in tears after being taunted for his presumed ethnicity, she comforts him by saying "it's not true, it's a horrible mistake" rather than by explaining the folly of such taunts. This prompts Phil's explosion of anger, brilliantly delivered with a rush of words whose eloquence comes from emotion:

I've come to see that lots of nice people who aren't [anti-Semitic], people who despise it and detest 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 a way off in some dark crackpot place with low-class morons.

Not surprisingly, this outburst lands Phil's engagement on the rocks. But his denouncement of respectable society's complicity in perpetuating racism ultimately leads to his publishing a powerful article and being rewarded with a happy resolution to his love life. (Personally, I think he ends up with the wrong woman, but there's no accounting for taste.) Gentleman's Agreement takes the idea of the impostor out of the personal and into the cultural arena, showing how enlightenment can result from walking in another man's shoes.

*See the Index by date for a list of other films in this month's series.

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