Now streaming<\/a> in the Criterion Channel\u2019s Elia Kazan\u2019s series<\/a>, Gentleman\u2019s Agreement <\/em>is worth a visit for Peck\u2019s performance and that of the impressive ensemble cast, but especially for its window into the longstanding nature of issues that resonate today, even if\u2014or maybe especially because\u2014it is dated and preachy. In ways both intentional and not, it offers perspective on a history of white liberals\u2019 sometimes flaccid, often self-righteous, and ever faltering responses to domestic racism, even as we invent novel buzzwords for those responses, i.e., anti-racist activism, white allies, white fragility, and getting woke.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Gentleman\u2019s Agreement, <\/em>Peck plays Phil Green, a morally unimpeachable widower and single father of Tommy (played by an eleven-year old Dean Stockwell). Phil and Tommy have just arrived in New York City from their home in California, as we are told in shameless exposition\u2014not scenarist Moss Hart\u2019s best work. They have come to live with the saintly \u201cMa\u201d Green (Anne Revere), the maternal source of Phil\u2019s moral backbone and anti-racist ideals. A talented journalist, Phil has been offered a job at a prestigious New York magazine, Smith\u2019s Weekly, <\/em>under the direction of Mr. Minify (Albert Deckker). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Green\u2019s assignment, embarked upon with initial reluctance: a series on the breadth and depth of anti-Semitism in American society. His angle, arrived at in a flash of inspiration: he will pretend to be Jewish for six months, allowing him to <\/em>\u201cfeel<\/em>\u201d the personal sting of it, as a surrogate for the magazine reader\u2014–and, really, for the film viewer. \u201cDark hair. Dark eyes. Sure. [\u2026] Name: Phil Green<\/em>. Ma, it\u2019s a cinch,\u201d he tells his mother. She enthuses about his plan, even though she worries that he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. \u201cDon\u2019t settle all the problems today; save some for tomorrow,\u201d she lovingly teases him at one point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, though Phil\u2019s ruse easily exposes anti-Semitism everywhere, it is not<\/em> a \u201ccinch.\u201d The assignment puts Phil through the ringer. To begin, he has a hard time explaining anti-Semitism to his own son, with anti-racist early education curriculum not yet a cottage industry. He tells Tommy\u2014who will later suffer the wrath of schoolyard bullies\u2014that people shouldn\u2019t be categorized by religious faith but rather by national identity, a vestige of the age of nationalism. Next, one of Mr. Minify\u2019s respected advisors, a successful Jewish businessman Irving Weisman (Robert Warwick), cautions against the expos\u00e9, calling it \u201ca very bad idea\u201d that will only \u201cstir it up more.\u201d According to lore, the Weisman character stood in for the Jewish studio moguls\u2019 reaction against Kazan and Fox chief Darryl Zanuck\u2019s determination to treat anti-Semitism; and Mr. Minify\u2019s response\u2014chiding Weisman and his Jewish colleagues\u2019 \u201cLet\u2019s-Be-Quiet-About-It\u201d timidity\u2014stood in for Kazan and Zanuck\u2019s retort. Then, Phil\u2019s new secretary Elaine Wales (June Havoc) reveals herself to be a Jew (really \u201cEstelle Walovsky\u201d) who has internalized the anti-Semitism she has experienced, including employment discrimination at Smith<\/em>\u2019s itself: \u201cThe great liberal magazine that fights injustice on all sides,\u201d she says, with withering sarcasm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Most importantly, Phil clashes with his new fianc\u00e9, Kathy Lacy (Dorothy McGuire), a beautiful divorcee, whose anti-racist woke-ness lags behind Phil\u2019s, threatening to grow into an insuperable chasm. This is the key to the film\u2019s dramatic structure, a genre hybrid in which the social problem threatens to rupture the romance. The effect is to suggest that the tragedy of anti-Semitism is its threat to the White Family, ergo the Nation; the threat, as Phil puts it is \u201cnot just the \u2018poor poor Jews,\u2019 but everything this country stands for.\u201d It wasn\u2019t lost on contemporary critics that the film uses a Gentile-disguised-as-a-Jew to generate sympathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In every way but one Kathy is an ideal wife to Phil (and mother to Tommy): Hazily lit and primly costumed, usually in bridely white, she is his equal in courtship dialogue and liberal politics; and she comes complete with a move-in ready suburban home in Connecticut. But the exception threatens to spoil their match. As Phil grows more committed, Kathy falters at every turn: can\u2019t she just tell her sister that Phil\u2019s not really <\/em>Jewish? What about all her friends at the engagement party? Why \u201cstart a whole mess for nothing\u201d? Why does Phil have to make a stink that their intended honeymoon site, a resort in New Hampshire, is \u201crestricted.\u201d? Why can\u2019t he just accept that there have always been these sorts of (titular) \u2018Gentleman\u2019s Agreements\u2019\u2014(mostly) unspoken pacts among upper-crusty Gentiles to keep Jews out of their clubs and neighborhoods?. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Donning her white privilege and white fragility as unsubtly as her white wardrobe, Kathy wants a break from Phil\u2019s \u201call tensed up and solemn\u201d social justice warring and all his \u201clessons on tolerance.\u201d She gets \u201ctired of feeling wrong\u201d all the time. She fails to condemn an anti-Semitic joke, for fear of spoiling a dinner party. After all, Kathy reasons, \u201cWhat can one person do?\u201d As the film makes explicit, Kathy represents the complicit complacency and hypocrisy of too-many white liberals, of \u201cKathys everywhere\u201d who \u201cmake little clucking sounds of disapproval [and] scold Bilbo [white supremacist US Senator from Mississippi] twice a year\u201d but fail to take any real action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Those scathing last lines are delivered by Anne Deltry (Celeste Holm), a fast-talking fashion editor who \u2018gets it\u2019 and thus represents an alternative romantic partner for Phil. It is a small role but a plum one, embodied with enough verve for Holm to nab Gentleman\u2019s Agreement<\/em>\u2019s third and final Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress Oscar over Revere, nominated for \u201cMa.\u201d The other notable supporting role, that of Phil\u2019s Jewish pal Dave Goldman played by John Garfield, was snubbed, probably because Garfield was up for Best Actor for his performance in Robert Rossen\u2019s Body and Soul<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Garfield\u2019s subsequent victimhood by the Hollywood Red Scare\u2014persecuted by HUAC and dead of a heart attack by age 39\u2014always heightens the poignancy of his onscreen appearances for me, no less so here. When he finally shows up halfway into the film, he gives it a needed shot of adrenaline. As Kazan put it, \u201cGod knows we were all tired of Peck and McGuire by [then].\u201d Garfield convincingly exudes Goldman\u2019s stoicism about anti-Semitism, a thick skin that indicts the society that thickened it. His soldier\u2019s uniform aligns him with all the Jews inserted into the multi-ethnic platoons of Hollywood\u2019s World War II combat films, tokens of U.S. democracy\u2019s superiority to Nazi fascism. So does a moving scene in which Dave recalls the battlefield death of a fellow Jewish soldier; the last words he ever heard were a derogatory slur from another fellow soldier at the very moment in which he gave his life for democracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While that last bit\u2014amounting to a hard-hitting criticism of U.S. racism\u2014might seem contradictory to any pro-American representation, the Hollywood Left considered it essential. To the Hollywood Left, the (not-always-fully-realized) greatness of the democratic American Way lie in its capacity to admit flaws (countenancing free speech about them) in order to fix them, progressing ever towards that \u2018more perfect union.\u2019 Unfortunately for Garfield, Kazan, and so many leftist filmmakers, the Hollywood Left\u2019s reign was about to be toppled by anti-communist cold warriors. Indeed, HUAC called its first postwar Hollywood hearings just weeks before Gentleman\u2019s Agreement<\/em>\u2019s release. Thereafter, the social criticisms iterated in their films would be used as evidence of their un-Americanism, on top of any evidence of past Communist Party membership or fellow traveling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Towards the end of Gentleman\u2019s Agreement<\/em>, Ma is hopeful. She speechifies, \u201cWhat will [the driving force of our century] be when men look far back to it one day? Maybe it won\u2019t be the \u2018American Century\u2019 after all, or the \u2018Russian Century,\u2019 or the \u2018Atomic Century.\u2019 Wouldn\u2019t it be wonderful if it turned out to be \u2018Everybody\u2019s Century,\u2019 when people all over the world\u2014free people\u2014found a way to live together?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether or not seventy-five years counts as looking \u201cfar back,\u201d I\u2019m afraid our current times prove Ma\u2019s optimism unfounded. On the other hand, her sage advice seems to have been followed: the American liberals of yesterday sure did save some problems for today.\u00a0\u00a0 “Gentleman’s Agreement” is now streaming<\/a> in the Criterion Channel\u2019s Elia Kazan\u2019s series<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/gentlemans-agreement-1024x768.jpg\")
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