|
Gentleman's AgreementRating:
Release Date: 02 March, 2004 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (11 total) |
Gentleman's Agreement Reviews
Exposing Racism Against Jews In late 1940s America
For those who have never experienced the effects of racism it must be difficult to comprehend what that does to a person. This film involves a magazine writer Philip Schuyler Green - played by Gregory Peck - who poses as a Jewish man to find out how people will react. He does this because he has been assigned to write a series of articles on anti-semitism. The way ordinary people react to Green shocks him to the core and underlines the deeply rooted racism against Jews which was present at that time. The most moving scene in the film for me is when Green is confronted by outright racism in a hotel. Director Elia Kazan and producer Darryl F Zanuck took a great risk producing this film and they did so against a backdrop of other well know Jewish film-makers pleading with them not to make it, because they knew the furore that it would produce. In the event Gentlemans Agreement was a hugely successful film and went on to take three Oscars. Gregory Peck paid heavily for his involvement in this film because he was blackballed by one establishment after another for the next twenty years. Gentleman's Agreement is a very powerful film which has not lost any of it's impact in the past five decades.
"You're not any more Jewish than I am."
Gregory Peck plays writer Philip S. Green in Elia Kazan's Best Picture Oscar winning film adaptation of Laura Z. Hobson's controversial novel, GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT. Daring for 1947, it seems rather tame now.
Green is an investigative reporter who 'becomes Jewish' for several months in order to discover the truth about anti-Semitism in post-World War Two America. What he finds out about ingrained prejudice is profoundly disturbing, especially when it invades his own home.
Peck is brilliant in the role, as is actor John Garfield, who plays Dave Goldman, his best friend. The rest of the cast is uneven, and the film loses itself too often in ham-handed moralizing and philosophizing which takes away from the story.
Still, it is difficult not to be sickened as the dapper Peck is turned away from a "Gentiles Only" establishment for no other reason than his assumed identity as a Jew; it is horrifying to see his young son (Dean Stockwell) traumatized after being attacked in the schoolyard for being a 'kike'; and worst of all, it is terrible to hear Peck's supposedly liberal girlfriend (Dorothy McGuire) comfort the boy with the words, "But it's not true...You're not any more Jewish than I am."
GENTLEMEN'S AGREEMENT has its flaws. It never gets its hands dirty by addressing the prejudices of anyone but the tennis club set, and it handles the issue the same way someone might approach a person with poor hygiene.
Yet, despite its shortcomings it dared to attack a very real and (to that point) unaddressed social problem then (and sadly still) existing in an open and democratic United States flush with its victory over Nazi Germany, underscoring that whether by Nuremberg Law or Gentleman's Agreement, prejudice is intolerable in a viable society.
More Customer Reviews (12 total)
You like Gentleman's Agreement?
|
