Elia Kazan (1947)
A call to arms against anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement strives to deliver its important moral message along with a reassuring conclusion to the romance between its two main characters. The twin imperatives increasingly jostle for the upper hand and Elia Kazan’s drama doesn’t, in the end, satisfy on either count. But the journey is worthwhile.
Philip Schuyler Green (Gregory Peck) is a sought-after investigative journalist and a widower. He moves to New York City with his young son Tommy (Dean Stockwell) and his mother (Anne Revere) and takes on an assignment for a politically liberal magazine called Smith’s Weekly: its editor John Minify (Albert Dekker) wants Phil to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism in present-day America. At a drinks party, Phil meets Minify’s niece, divorcee Kathy Lacey (Dorothy McGuire), and learns that it was she who suggested the topic to her uncle. After struggling to find an angle for the assignment, Phil suddenly hits on an idea. He’s a Gentile: in order to experience anti-Semitic prejudice first hand, he’ll pretend to be Jewish.
At first, he tells only Minify, who agrees to keep the secret. As Phil embarks on the project, he also starts dating Kathy and it’s not long before he confides in her too. Her immediate reaction is to check with Phil that he isn’t really Jewish – ‘Not that it would make any difference to me’. Kathy and Phil grow close and decide to marry her shallow open-mindedness and effective complicity with the anti-Semitism endemic to the social circles she’s part of are a recurring, worsening source of friction between them. In one of their exchanges, Kathy describes the unwritten laws of property ownership in affluent areas of Connecticut – Darien, where Kathy owns a cottage, and the ironically named New Canaan:
‘It’s detestable, but that’s the way it is. It’s even worse in New Canaan. There, nobody can sell or rent to a Jew. Even in Darien … there’s sort of a gentleman’s agreement when you buy …’
The screenplay, an adaptation by Moss Hart (and Kazan) of a novel of the same name by Laura Z Hobson, includes a lot of speechifying. This often grates – how much tends to depend on the actor delivering the speech – but the script is convincing in one, highly counterproductive respect. It persuades you that Phil finds Kathy’s attitudes so ingrained and objectionable that the pair don’t have a future together.
Kathy remarks about property in Connecticut are sparked by the plight of Dave Goldman (John Garfield), a Jewish friend of Phil’s since boyhood. After serving in the recently ended World War, Dave is looking to move his family from California to work in New York but he needs a place for them to live. A conversation between Kathy and Dave is the film’s eleventh-hour means to a happy end. By now, her relationship with Phil seems irreparable. She tells Dave of her bitter regret at failing to speak out against anti-Semitic remarks made by others at a social event she recently attended, and at the rift between her and Phil. In response, Dave gives her the following sermon:
‘A man wants his wife to be more than just a companion, Kathy, more than his beloved girl, more than even the mother of his children. He wants a sidekick, a buddy – to go through the rough spots with. And, well, she has to feel that the same things are the rough spots or they’re always out of line with each other. You’re not cast in bronze, sweetie. You’re nice and soft and pliable – and you can do anything you have to do or want to do with yourself. … But it’s got to be more than talk.’
In the next scene, Dave arrives at Phil’s apartment, interrupting his mother’s proudly rhetorical reaction to the appearance of her son’s anti-Semitism pieces in Smith’s Weekly. Dave announces he can now accept the job he’s been offered in New York. Kathy, who had previously rejected Phil’s suggestion that they let Dave stay in the Darien cottage for the time being (‘It’d be too uncomfortable for Dave – knowing he’d moved into one of those neighbourhoods’), has changed her mind. What’s more, she is ‘going to live up [in Darien] all summer at her sister’s and if anybody dishes anything out she’ll be right there to dish it back’. In Gentleman’s Agreement’s closing sequence, Phil hotfoots it round to Kathy’s apartment. When she opens the door, they conclusively embrace. Dorothy McGuire has made Kathy’s failings too credibly part of her for this finale to pass muster. When Phil and Kathy hug but don’t speak, Kazan may well mean to suggest that actions speak louder than words; the effect is, rather, to keep fresh in the mind Dave’s injunction that doing the right thing has ‘got to be more than talk’. It’s hard not to feel the film’s last sequence is a required upbeat coda – that an obedient, lasting change of heart on Kathy’s part is something easier said than done.
The End is the only wordless conclusion in Gentleman’s Agreement that’s weak, however. Elsewhere, silence just before a cut to the next scene is golden – perhaps not surprisingly in view of how distinctive it is in such a persistently talky picture. There’s embarrassed silence when Phil informs an editorial meeting at the magazine that he’s Jewish. There’s a frustrated silence when he goes to the posh country hotel where he and Kathy had planned to spend their honeymoon. Phil tells the manager he’s Jewish in an attempt to prise out of him an admission that the hotel has a ‘restricted’ policy. Although this is clearly the case, Phil can’t get the manager to say it is. The latter ends the interview and disappears back into his office. Heads turned towards the reception desk when Phil started to make a scene. Now the people in the lobby avert their eyes. Phil is impotent to do anything more and exits. These silent scene endings are strengthened by Kazan’s very sparing use of Alfred Newman’s score. The final scene is different from these others in that it’s not entirely soundless but accompanied by music.
Gregory Peck is conscientious but problematic. His best moments, other than at the end of the sequence in the restricted hotel, come in the more light-hearted parts of Phil’s scenes with his mother and Tommy, and the few relaxed bits of the romance with Kathy. On one occasion after they’ve had cross words, Phil apologises to her, calling himself a ‘solemn fool’. That adjective is right for Peck, a self-conscious mouthpiece for Gentleman’s Agreement’s earnest liberalism. The hero is meant to be prone to fly off the handle but the man playing him is the least impulsive of actors. Other characters keep telling Phil how he looks and sounds: Peck rarely answers to the description. In a key scene, Tommy Green, who also pretends to be Jewish in order to strengthen his father’s cover story, returns from school in tears because of anti-Semitic taunts from other kids. When Kathy comforts Tommy, telling him he needn’t worry because he isn’t really Jewish, Phil’s righteous anger comes through loud and clear. Whether he feels guilty that it’s his own dissembling that has caused his son distress isn’t so apparent. Because of the way the part is played, it’s hard to know here if Phil is insensitive or if Gregory Peck is failing to convey his mixed feelings.
The other main cast members are more satisfying. Dorothy McGuire’s characterisation is more complex than it was in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her previous collaboration with Kazan. Kathy’s anxiety to please Phil is always liable to be undermined by her entitled streak; she may have been working as a pre-school teacher since her divorce but Kathy has an intrinsic sense of privilege. McGuire makes her socially and psychologically believable. This is one of four strong women’s performances in Gentleman’s Agreement. Anne Revere’s skilful underplaying, for most of Mrs Green’s time on screen, is in welcome contrast to the temper of her son’s crusade. Her closing speech (more below) is impossible but not nearly as bad as it might have been: Revere stays tenaciously in character.
The secretary assigned to Phil at the magazine is Elaine Wales, née Estelle Wilovksy. In other words, she’s Phil’s mirror image, a Jew pretending to be a Gentile. Elaine (June Havoc) explains to Phil (whom she believes to be Jewish) that she changed her name to improve her job prospects. It made the difference even at the supposedly unprejudiced Smith’s Weekly. The purpose of this narrowly written role is to make ironic points but June Havoc looks physically right and does well when Elaine learns that John Minify, after hearing about her experience from Phil, has instructed his personnel people to stop anti-Semitic discrimination in recruiting staff. Elaine isn’t keen on the idea: she worries the ‘wrong Jews’ may get jobs.
Best of all is Celeste Holm. She is Anne Dettrey, the magazine’s fashion editor, who carries a torch for Phil from an early stage. Holm is exhilaratingly witty and nuanced – often funny, piercing as Anne absorbs the disappointing news that Phil is engaged to Kathy. This is a case of a performer scoring a bullseye with just about every line and look, without ever overdoing things. (When I said this to Sally after I got back from seeing the film, she replied, ‘like Laura Dern in Marriage Story’. This happened to be the day before Dern won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for that performance, as Celeste Holm did for Gentleman’s Agreement.)
Phil’s tactics include getting Elaine to prepare pairs of form letters – one signed by him as Schuyler Green, the other as Philip Greenberg – applying for jobs, apartments, medical schools, club memberships, and so on. There’s not much dramatic potential in this: the responses Phil gets are presumably exactly along the discriminating lines that he expects. Until the hotel scene and Tommy’s schoolyard trauma, Phil is hardly on the receiving end of anti-Semitism, except when a doctor (Nicholas Joy) visiting the ailing Mrs Green makes ‘chosen people’ remarks that he awkwardly modifies once Phil announces that he’s Jewish. There’s more impact in the moment when Dave, still in military uniform, goes for a drunken man who tells him, ‘I don’t like officers – I especially don’t like them if they’re yids’. John Garfield’s portrait of Dave comes across as both natural and strongly felt.
There’s plenty wrong with the writing. The film starts with some primitive expository dialogue between Phil and Tommy, though Gregory Peck and the eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell play the scene well. That Kathy and Mrs Green never get to meet seems increasingly odd. More vexing is the artificial delay before Phil has his lightbulb moment on the angle for his assignment. He recalls doing pieces on the Great Depression and coal mining:
‘I bought some old clothes and a broken-down car and took Route 66 myself. … I slept in a shack … I didn’t sit in my bedroom and do research … I got myself a job. I went in the dark.’
If living the life of his subjects is the famous Schuyler Green’s journalistic trademark, it’s baffling that a similar strategy takes so long to occur to him for the anti-Semitism pieces.
The delay is surprising too because Moss Hart and Kazan are otherwise impatient to get on their soapbox, which is too often also a high horse. Some of the rhetoric (and some of what doesn’t get said: there’s no mention, beyond Dave Goldman’s personal experience, of anti-Semitism in relation to World War II) is harder to swallow now than it may have been in 1947. Although the picture deals with an urgent contemporary problem, it was made at a time of understandable optimism for the future, even if the Cold War was getting underway by the time the film opened in theatres. Seventy years on, Mrs Green’s peroration rings pretty hollow:
‘The world is stirring in very strange ways. Maybe this is the century for it. Maybe that’s why it’s so troubled. Other centuries had their driving forces. What will ours have been when men look back? Maybe it won’t be the American century after all or the Russian century or the atomic century. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it turned out to be everybody’s century, when people all over the world – free people – found a way to live together?’
Yet Gentleman’s Agreement, for all its faults, deserved its commercial and critical success. It’s a thoroughly absorbing drama, even if the praise and prizes it received were down more to its worthy intentions than to their achievement (and even though it’s in some ways less remarkable than the same year’s similarly-themed Crossfire). The film also won the Academy Award for Best Picture and, for Elia Kazan, the first of his two Best Director Oscars.
8 February 2020
