Oscars Retrospective: Gentleman's Agreement (20th Academy Awards Review)

 

Main Titles~Gentleman's Agreement - Edward B. Powell

The Lost Weekend (1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Gentleman’s Agreement form a nice little trilogy of Oscar winners that seemed to be seriously challenging social mores and analyzing social issues that post-war Americans would have been going through. In an ideal world, this is something that I should be able to say about the Oscar winner every year but I digress. And similar to the other two films, Gentleman’s Agreement seems to occupy a much more realistic setting, trying to showcase a situation that feels like it could actually happen.

Based on a best-selling novel that actually came out that same year (damn, Hollywood worked fast back then), Gentleman’s Agreement details the story of Philip Schuyler Greene (Gregory Peck), a magazine writer who is hired by his boss, Mr. Minify (Albert Dekker), to write an article on anti-Semitism. Greene struggles to come up with a unique angle on how to best address this issue as, being a gentile, he has no first-hand experience with anti-Semitism. After hemming and hawing (probably longer than needed), Greene ultimately decides to take the tact of pretending to be Jewish himself and writing about his first-hand encounters with anti-Semitism.

Similar to some previous Oscar wins such as Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives, Gentleman’s Agreement is a movie where I find the historiography surrounding it far more interesting than the actual movie (although unlike those aforementioned films, I actually do like this movie). I try to avoid talking about controversial issues too much during this blog and keep it about the movies but as we get further and further into 20th Century America wherein public attitudes towards race would become increasingly front-and-center, these discussions become unavoidable. Especially given that we’re reviewing the Academy Awards, a show that is ostensibly meant to reflect the best and most influential movies of their given year.

Anyway, let’s talk about Hollywood and Judaism. There is the old stereotype of “Jews running Hollywood” which is an oft used anti-Semitic dog whistle although the fact of the matter is that many of the earliest producers and moguls who used to rule Hollywood with an iron fist (Louis Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner etc.) were Jewish. At the other end of the spectrum is our favorite punching bag on this blog, Joseph Breen, the President of the Hays Office, who was a staunch and judgmental Irish Catholic. Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, Breen wrote several letters decrying these moguls using language that was more than a little anti-Semitic. (The actual quote refers to him referring to the moguls as “the scum of the scum of the earth” and using the word Jew pretty interchangeably when referring to the moguls.)

The Hollywood execs kowtowed pretty quickly to the Hays Office in 1934 as they didn’t want to deal with the headaches of potential boycotts of their films. Pretty much whatever Breen considered moral or ethical was the baseline for what films were allowed to go by. We’ve touched on the Hays Code and complained about it multiple times and how I think that it probably set challenging filmmaking and race relations back about 20 years in Hollywood. Yet for how offensive most portrayals of minorities became during Hays Code-era films, the subject of Judaism was one that was curiously absent. If you remember The Life of Emile Zola (1937), it’s a plot point in that film that the character being attacked by the villains is Jewish but the film dances around that topic as the producers didn’t want to have to pick a fight between their censor and their heritage.

Breen, for his part, would avow himself to be anti-anti-Semitic though I have trouble believing that. For most of the 30s, he was more concerned about movies that would offend Germans and other fascist-leaning citizens than he was of films that might offend Jews and other minorities. (Supposedly, he was instrumental in preventing a film adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ novel, It Can’t Happen Here (1935), one of the most famous novels of the 1930s that details the rise of an American dictator and would’ve been perfect for a Hollywood adaptation.) He didn’t officially drop this cause until Pope Pius XI issued an edict calling for Catholics to denounce anti-Semitism in 1939. This is part of why there weren’t any films attacking German or Japanese fascism until after World War II actually began.

As despicable as Breen is, it does bear mentioning that America in general was much more casually racist back then. This man didn’t exist in a vacuum; most Americans in general generally didn’t take too kindly to other peoples and kept to their own. Then World War II happened. During this time, Hollywood churned out non-stop propaganda films celebrating American involvement and its history of diversity and how important these values were to uphold against the tide of hateful fascism around the world. And as the war ended, the full horrors of the Holocaust were fully unveiled for the whole world to see, showing the end result of pure, unapologetic racism carried to its horrific conclusion. If there was ever a time for a society to conduct a mea culpa and introspect its own racial attitudes, this was it. This is the time period where Gentleman’s Agreement came out. It was a movie that, fresh off of World War II, dared to hold up a mirror and show anti-Semitism as it exists in everyday life.

Gregory Peck was not amused.

On the movie itself, the best and worst thing about Gentleman’s Agreement is its narrow-focused set-up. The film is very smart in that it doesn’t focus on any of the easy targets that most other anti-racism movies would go after. There isn’t a big trial or a police investigation or any other already-clichéd stories. Hell, the movie doesn’t even mention the Holocaust or the persecution of Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany. It’s a film that trusts its audience to be intelligent enough to have those events at the back of their mind while watching. Instead, it just shows a normal guy going through life as a Jew and encountering all manners of passive-aggressive treatment that pisses him off.

There’s a lot of little moments that stick with Greene and, by extension, the audience. Like how when he tells his janitor (uncredited) that he’s Jewish and the janitor looks at him funny. Or when he needs to go to the hospital and the doctor (Nicholas Joy) tries to steer him away from one surgeon because that surgeon happens to also be Jewish. It’s a very quietly chilling story that feels very timeless. You know for a fact that most of these events were ubiquitous back then and you can still very easily see them happening today. While the movie is about anti-Semitism specifically, you could easily swap out the subject matter for any other minority and much of the commentary would still apply.

Gentleman’s Agreement also avoids a lot of clichés with this genre by not making most of the characters that Greene encounters hooping and hollering racists. One of the best scenes in the movie is where Greene tries to check into a hotel and is denied because of his perceived faith. The clerks who talk to him aren’t seen as evil; they come across as guys who are just trying to do their jobs and don’t want to offend their bosses or customers. This invites the audience into much more squeamish discomfort by recognizing their own prejudices in these bit parts.

While this set-up does invite interest for most of its running time, it does fall apart in the third act. One of the golden rules of writing and storytelling is the euphemism, “Show, don’t tell.” In other words, a story that shows you its moral is more powerful and going to stick with you while a story that spells out its moral and whacks you over the head with it will leave you more annoyed with it. And for most of the running time, Gentleman’s Agreement does show its lesson which is what makes it more powerful. During the last act, however, it transforms from a parable into a lecture.

Most of the last act is just speech after speech after speech hammering the lesson of the movie in and demanding the audience to start taking action. One inspirational speech might have been enough but when it’s twenty minutes of the characters reiterating the lessons of the film over and over again, your eyes start glazing over and you get bored. (Anne Revere’s transparently Oscar-baiting speech is especially mind-numbing, doubly so since this is supposed to be the impassioned plea of the film and it’s coming from a character who isn’t even Jewish.)

Now, in total fairness, with a set-up like this, I honestly don’t know what the ideal climax should be. It’s a movie examining casual prejudice in society, not straight-up violent racism, so something like a police arrest or trial would be a bridge too far. While the movie has a good idea in forcing Greene and his girlfriend (Dorothy McGuire) to examine their own prejudices, it feels like it misses the boat in its execution.

And while we’re addressing problems in the movie, it bothers me that most of the Jewish characters aren’t given a lot of depth. While there are token moments where Greene meets some Jews in his journey and learns about their problems, most of them usually never show up again or don’t get a lot of punchy depth. I mentioned in my review of Cimarron (1931) the issue of the “white savior” trope that you see in many Oscar frontrunners/wins/feel-good movies to come out of Hollywood and it seems worth returning to in this case. (For a refresher, white savior is a trope wherein a film will be about examining a culture or person who is a minority but will revolve around a white main character who helps uplift said minority. Many of these films usually either win or are frontrunners for Oscars.)

In fairness to Gentleman’s Agreement, I do think it is important to have the main character be a gentile but the fact that most of the Jews are relatively minor characters is still a problem, especially in a movie that wants to illustrate the plight of Jewish people. They come off more as plot devices than actual people. Especially since, again, none of the speeches made at the end of the movie are made by any Jewish characters.

Despite harping on these problems, and they are big ones, I still would consider Gentleman’s Agreement a good movie. Gregory Peck is an especially good actor who was known for acting in some very culturally important and challenging films and this was a major bump in the right direction for his career. And he is perfect for this role. Philip Greene could easily have come off as too preachy or too whiny with another actor in the part but Peck is just the right level of angry.

If you look up this movie on RottenTomatoes (a movie reviewing website whose rating system is a flawed but good barometer on quality), the consensus reads that Gentleman’s Agreement is more of an important film than a great one and I think that is the best way of describing it. As a movie it is very flawed and never quite reaches the heights of becoming a truly great film. The set-up is great and it has several great scenes but most of the side-characters are mediocre and it could have used some trimming of the fat. As a cultural touchstone, however, Gentleman’s Agreement is a very important landmark, both for its delicate touch and for the time period in history that it exists. This is probably one of the most important movies ever made and presents a very timeless and nuanced portrayal of racism.

But is that enough to call it movie of the year though?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2

14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2

15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2

16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2

17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2

18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2

19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2