Gentleman's Agreement

When my wife and I started our quest to watch all the Best Picture winners, there were a number of movies where we were had no knowledge of the movie. The majority of these are from the earlier days of cinema, the first thirty years or so of the Academy Awards. Some of those movies have stood the test of time, like Casablanca, Rebecca, or Gone With The WInd, but just as many have fallen through the cracks of history, their Acadamy Award victories little more than footnotes or historical curiosities. Everybody knows Gone With The Wind, but who remembers Mrs. Miniver? Gentleman's Agreement seems to be in that latter category, a movie whose win is barely more than the answer to a pub trivia question. "Who won the Best Picture at the 20th Academy Awards?". The name sounds like you're in for a whimsical romantic comedy. Even when I read the description and saw who was in it, I still thought it would probably lean more towards comedy. Blame it on a childhood seeing movies like Soul Man and Just One Of The Guys, or Eddie Murphy's "White Like Me" sketch from SNL. Lo and behold, Gentleman's Agreement is a dead serious movie, looking at the climate of post-WW2 antisemitism in the United States, from multiple angles. The Jim Crow-esque silent segregationist policies that would see hotels "restricted" to Christians, but were too afraid to actually say out loud that was the policy. The "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mentality of Jewish people changing their name to blend in and wanting to discourage Jewish people from breaking down barriers. The limousine liberals who view antisemitism and discrimination as the evil it is, who will cry "someone should do something" in private, but when faced with an antisemite, their lips stay shut. And of course, the out-and-proud antisemites who will freely use slurs. Gentlemen's Agreement tackles just about every kind of antisemitism you can think of, openly and directly. It would be a bold movie to make now (and probably get a bunch of whiny morons calling it "woke" and "virtue signalling"); in 1947, it was unthinkable ... and yet it happened. The acting is, of course, excellent. Four members of the cast were up for acting awards, and every single one of them earned those nominations. Gregory Peck, an actor whom I've never much clicked with, puts on a fantastic performance as Phil, starting off as a columnist chasing a story, and as his eyes are widened, a man on a crusade to expose the insidious menace of prejudice. Dorothy McGuire's performance as Kathy, Peck's conflicted fiance, is compelling, as her involvement with Phil forces her to confront the quiet biases both in herself and in her world of high society Boston. Celeste Holm steals every scene she's in as Anne, a fellow columnist at the same magazine as Phil and a firecracker of a human being. Every actor is given their moments to shine. That being said, it's not a perfect movie. While Phil's journey exposes him to many forms of antisemitism, there's no exploration or even mention of these events being only a couple years after World War II, when Jewish people were an enemy of the state of Nazi Germany. The dichotomy of them being good enough to rescue but not good enough to rent a hotel room -- or even that the antisemitism mirrors the Nazis, albeit in a more benign way -- feels like an elephant in the room that nobody, not even Phil, mentions. There's also something to be said about how Phil's exploration of antisemitism seems to be limited to the upper class. Hate is hate, sure; at the fundamental level, whether it's a construction worker using a nasty epithet or some stuffed shirt harrumphing when they find out the person they're talking to is Jewish, it comes down to the same thing. But leaving out aspects like violence, harassment, destruction of property, graffiti, and the more overt, hostile acts of antisemitism makes Gentleman's Agreement feel sanitized. It wants to approach and discuss and even shame prejudice and hatred, but it also wants to believe that hatred is always expressed with some white-glove, pinkies-in-the-air sense of decorum. Gentleman's Agreement is honest to a fault in its exploration of its themes, but only within a narrow scope. Also, far less of an issue but one worth mentioning, the ending sucks. It is glib and artificial, a Hollywood ending for people who want everything tied up in a bow. Team Anne, all the way. Even with its incomplete handling of the central issue, Gentlemen's Agreement is still a bold movie, and one with an overall message that is still resonant today. It is a reminder that prejudice of any kind does not need to be overt to be destructive. Good people can keep hatred and prejudice alive by waiting for someone else to be the one to do something when bad people make their voices heard. This shouldn't be lost to the annals of history or consigned to the "oh, THAT won?" bin where movies like How Green Was My Valley and Out of Africa live. Gentlemen's Agreement deserves better than that. It deserves to be seen.