I have been filling out my knowledge of cinema recently, and one of the gaps was “Gentleman’s Agreement”, the 1947 Best Picture starrting Atticus Finch…oh, sorry, G. Peck, Dorothy Maguire, john Garfield, June Havoc, etc. Directed by the great Elia Kazan.
I have been struggling to get through this thing for two weeks. I can only stand about 10 minutes at a time. It’s absolutely horrible. Stunningly bad. Jaw-droppingly awful. I’m floored by how sophomoric, simplistic, stilted, and just plain embarrassing it is. THere hasn’t been a believable 30 seconds to be seen anywhere. And I’m not even referring to the subject matter… it’s just shockingly inept filmmaking.
The only thing I can think of is that everyone was just so gosh darn moved by the social righteousness of it that they were blind to what a pitifully bad film it is.
So the fact that the world at large didn’t kick it to the curb I guess I get… but how did it end up so goddamn bad to begin with, given the giant talents involved?
It’s certainly a ‘Hollywood Message Picture’, and I agree it’s not a subtle film by any stretch, but I find it very enjoyable and admirable, for its time. I also love the performances of Peck, Celeste Holm, John Garfield, Anne Revere, and perhaps especially little Dean Stockwell. Dorothy McGuire is the odd woman out, but then I always find her a stiff piece of wood – the only move I can stand her in is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and that’s mainly 'cause she’s playing a fairly cold (at least on the outside) character. Every time I watch Gentleman’s Agreement I can’t beLIEVE Peck rejects funny, warm-hearted, intellectual, sexy, liberal Holm for the ice princess McGuire. He’s nuts.
Even if you dislike the message part of the film, I’m surprised you didn’t at least find something charming in Phil’s relationship with his kid and mom, which I think is so warm, endearing and down-to-earth; same goes for his friendship with Dave (John Garfield).
One of the rare films that improves on the book, IMHO. But I can understand it not being to everyone’s taste. It’s pretty old fashioned and ham-fisted. Yet I like it anyway. Maybe 'cause I’m Jewish, so it strikes me as both poignant and pointed? I dunno.
I get Kazan and Kramer mixed up, because they had a certain unsubtlety in common. When either one made a movie that was more driven by its theme than by its story, they tended to get very earnest and preachy. Still, Gentleman’s Agreement is a long, LONG way from jaw droppingly awful. Have you seen many other films from that time period?
I think Gentleman’s Agreement wasn’t even the best movie about American anti-Semitism put out in 1947. The much-darker Crossfire, which revolves around an anti-Semitic murder and starred Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, holds up better today.
Interestingly, Crossfire was based on a novel called “The Brick Foxhole” by future-director Richard Brooks and was one of the earliest efforts to address what came to known as homophobia. However, there was no way Hollywood was going to tackle the subject of homosexuality in 1947 (just trying to get them to talk about anti-Semitism was difficult enough). So when the novel was adapted for the screen, the murder victim was changed from gay to Jewish.
While I agree that *Crossfire *is a far better movie than Gentleman’s Agreement, it will forever be tarnished for me that it used anti-semitism only as a device to censor a discussion of homophobia. It’s hard to divorce that context from the movie when I watch it, which is as I said unfortunate, because outside of that it’s a movie well worth watching. Certainly more worthwhile than Gentleman’s Agreement.
I don’t know about “many”, but looking at other top-category Acadamy Award nominees and winners from the five years prior and after, we get films like (and I’m only including films I’ve seen and know for sure are good to great, and miles better than GA)
All about Eve
Double Indemnity
On the waterfront
The Lost Weekend
The Member of the Wedding
Come Back, Little Sheba
Casablanca
Gaslight
The Yearling
It’s a Wonderful Life
Sorry, Wrong Number
Joan of Arc
Pinky
Born Yesterday
Sunset Boulevard
Harvey
Cyrano de Bergerac
The African Queen
A Streetcar Named Desire
Lifeboat
Laura
I don’t think GA is fit to shine the boots of any of these films.
On the other hand, I noticed that 1947 top nominees are all pretty unknown to me, so I assume the competition was weak.
GA is one of only a few mainstream/Hollywood movies with “Jewish themes”, even in the immediate post-WWII era. That’s an odd situation considering that many studio executives at that time were Jews. My wild guess (note the cite-free quality of this post) is that the lack of Jewish themed movies reflected the desire of us Jews to keep a low profile in society so we’d be left the heck alone, as well as the concern that Jews were only a small percentage of the population and therefore a small potential audience.
I haven’t seen GA in a while. As I recall it resonated more with me than the OP because of my Jewish heritage. It reminded me how prejudiced society was even in the late 40s. Times are much better now, although not perfect.
I suspect that GA ages about as well as the original Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner - not very well IMO. Sidney Poitier’s character was such a perfect human being that the only disadvantages one could possibly consider him having as a son-in-law were his skin tone, and that he and the daughter were moving away immediately. This being the sixties, the second concern was barely mentioned. :rolleyes: A handsome, kind, caring, loving, gentle, respectful, wealthy, charismatic doctor wants to marry my daughter? They’re both over 21, and they love each other dearly? Where do I sign?! I’d almost change teams and marry him myself, but I’m spoken for.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was just remade as a Meet the Parents clone comedy. Hollywood cannot even imagine a reasonable character today objecting to a mixed-race marriage. I’m not sure a GA remake would even make sense to today’s audience. There’s still plenty of prejudice out in the US, but it’s no longer taken seriously by Hollywood. Better times.
An awful lot of Oscar winners and nominees had themes that seem trite and obvious, even for their time. Oscar movies are not really known for being groundbreakers that challenge current taboos. They pick up on popular themes that are no longer so controversial. Here are my summaries of some winners and nominees. Yes, in many cases I’ve simplified the films. Also, some of these themes, although they were admirable in some sense, were messed up in other ways.
1929-1930 winner - All Quiet on the Western Front
Terrible things happened in World War I.
1932-1933 nominee - I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and 1940 nominee - The Grapes of Wrath
Poverty makes people do terrible things.
1939 winner - Gone with the Wind
The Confederates weren’t all purely evil.
1940 nominee - The Great Dictator
Hitler was not a nice person.
1941 nominee - Citizen Kane
Some studio executives are not nice people.
1943 winner - Casablanca
Nazis are not nice people.
1944 winner - Going My Way
Catholics, even Catholic priests, are nice people.
1945 winner - The Lost Weekend
We should feel sympathetic towards alcoholics.
1946 winner - The Best Years of Our Lives
We should feel sympathetic towards handicapped people.
1947 winner - Gentleman’s Agreement
We should feel sympathetic towards Jewish people.
1948 nominee - The Snake Pit
We should feel sympathetic towards mentally ill people.
1955 winner - Marty
We should feel sympathetic towards less than well-off, less than handsome, less than exciting people.
1957 winner - The Bridge on the River Kwai
Terrible things happened in World War II.
1956 nominee - 12 Angry Men
We shouldn’t assume that a defendent is guilty because he’s poor and had a bad lawyer defending him.
1958 nominee - The Defiant Ones
It’s O.K. for blacks and whites to cooperate.
1959 nominee - The Diary of Anne Frank
Many Jews were killed in World War II.
1960 winner - The Apartment
There are many corrupt businessmen.
1961 winner - West Side Story
We should feel sympathetic to poor Hispanics and other poor people.
1962 nominee - To Kill a Mockingbird and 1988 nominee - Mississippi Burning
The South was full of prejudiced people who tried to prevent investigations of crimes against blacks and who convicted blacks of crimes they didn’t commit.
1964 nominee - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The Cold War is crazy.
1967 winner - In the Heat of the Night and 1967 nominee - Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
We should be sympathetic towards black people.
1969 winner - Midnight Cowboy
People can get themselves into desperate situations and not be completely evil.
1972 winner - The Godfather and 1974 winner - The Godfather Part II and 1974 nominee - Chinatown and 1990 nominee - The Godfather Part III
People get away with evil crimes in our society.
1975 winner - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Mental institutions can do bad things to people.
1977 nominee - Star Wars
It’s O.K. to nominate a science fiction film.
1978 winner - The Deer Hunter and 1978 nominee - Coming Home and 1979 nominee - Apocalypse Now and 1986 winner - Platoon and 1989 nominee - Born on the Fourth of July
Terrible things happened in the Vietnam War
1984 nominee - The Killing Fields
Terrible things happened just after the Vietnam War.
1979 nominee - Norma Rae
Some businesses don’t treat their workers well.
1982 winner - Gandhi
British colonialism was bad.
1982 nominee - Missing
The U.S. looks the other way when some third-world countries do evil things.
1985 nominee - A Soldier’s Story
The U.S. military was segregated and treated blacks badly.
1987 nominee - Children of a Lesser God
We should be sympathetic towards deaf people.
1988 winner - Rain Man
We should be sympathetic towards autistic people.
1990 winner - Dances with Wolves
We should feel sympathetic towards American Indians.
1991 nominee - JFK
Sometimes the government covers things up.
1993 nominee - In the Name of the Father
The British government ignored ordinary legal protections and convicted innocent people of crimes during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
2001 nominee - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and 2002 nominee - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and 2003 winner - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
It’s O.K. to nominate a fantasy film.
2004 winner - Million Dollar Baby
We should feel sympathetic towards people who feel that there’s no point in going on living and who want to die.
2005 nominee - Brokeback Mountain and 2005 nominee - Capote and 2008 nominee - Milk
We should feel sympathetic towards gay men.
2005 nominee - Good Night, and Good Luck
There was a blacklist and TV networks were cowards about it.
2007 nominee - Juno
We should feel sympathetic towards unwed pregnant teenagers.
2008 nominee - Slumdog Millionaire
It’s O.K. to make a movie about poor people in the third world without a single Western character for the audience to identify with.
Well, again, as I stated at the outset, my complaints about the film have nothing to do with the theme, it’s the execution. It could be about horseracing. The acting blows, it’s slow, it comes off like a high school play.
The plot point/writing gap that has caused me the biggest eyeroll so far is the relationship between Peck and Maguire. He meets her at a party and the NEXT time we see them, they realize they are in love and get engaged!! Wha?
As far as the theme goes, what of course jumps out at me in 2009 is how, during a conversation with his secretary about discrimination and racial epithets, he scorns her use of the word “kike” to describe herself and mentions a few other terms he finds unacceptable, including “coon” and “nigger”… but we’re going to devote a movie to anti-semitism and think ourselves enlightened when (apart from the challenge of pretending to be black) there’s no chance in hell anyone would even think about making this same movie by replacing the Jews with (to use the era-appropriate term) Negroes?
Man, do I love living in 2009 for more reasons than I even realized…
Hear, hear! The first time I saw that movie, I was sure that Peck’s character and Holm’s character would get together in the end. I was very disappointed when they didn’t.
Does your “filling out” program include many 1940s or earlier movies? Acting then wasn’t intended to be as naturalistic as it later became. It was stylized in the service of telling the story. Thus you had dialogue that was unnaturally rhetorical. Good screenplays today don’t have characters speak in such tight, imagery-filled speeches.
We did this earlier in the thread. See my list of films made before and after that I consider good-to-great. It’s not about the era. It’s about this particular movie.
> As far as the theme goes, what of course jumps out at me in 2009 is how,
> during a conversation with his secretary about discrimination and racial
> epithets, he scorns her use of the word “kike” to describe herself and mentions
> a few other terms he finds unacceptable, including “coon” and “nigger”… but
> we’re going to devote a movie to anti-semitism and think ourselves enlightened
> when (apart from the challenge of pretending to be black) there’s no chance in
> hell anyone would even think about making this same movie by replacing the
> Jews with (to use the era-appropriate term) Negroes?
That’s part of my point. They were willing to give an Oscar to a film that illustrated the (just barely) non-controversial theme that we shouldn’t be prejudiced against Jews. Making films in which one showed that one shouldn’t be prejudiced against blacks was twenty years in the future, when that theme finally became (just barely) non-controversial. Mainstream Hollywood films always wimp out. They don’t lead the country in pushing the boundaries. They step through the boundaries that have already been broken.
