Gregory Peck: Early Days As a Young Actor Living in NYC; 'Gentleman's Agreement' 1947, Best Picture

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- American Film Institute. (2 mins). Gregory Peck talks to AFI Conservatory Fellows about his early days as a young actor living in New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Peck
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- Trailer, Gentleman's Agreement, 1947. Director: Elia Kazan. Starring: Albert Dekker, Anne Revere, Celeste Holm, Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck, John Garfield. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Laura Hobson's tale of a writer who poses as a Jew to research the subject of anti-Semitism. Daring winner of Best Picture Oscar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentleman%27s_Agreement
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- The Guardian. 'My favorite best picture Oscar winner: Gentleman's Agreement.' Feb. 15, 2017. In the first of a new series, Peter Bradshaw explains why the 1947 drama about a journalist exploring antisemitism by posing as a Jew remains a sharp & high-minded watch.

In 1947, the Oscar for best picture went to Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as the campaigning journalist on a mission. Awards for best director also went to Elia Kazan and best supporting actress to Celeste Holm. At first glance, it looks like a rather worthy “issue movie” of the 40s, the sort of film that the Academy felt it had to honour. Yet Gentleman’s Agreement is still a riveting movie, intriguing, a little exasperating, alternately naive and very sharp, fascinating for what it puts in and leaves out.

It is about the antisemitism of prosperous postwar America and the insidious way that Jews were excluded from upscale social clubs, vacation resorts and of course jobs. There were no official bans, just a nod and a wink and a “gentleman’s agreement” between conservative-minded Wasp gentiles that they know the sort of people they want to associate with. It is the sort of everyday prejudice that Groucho Marx elegantly knocked back with his joke about not wanting to join a club that would have him as a member. Not that explicit bigoted language was in any way uncommon.

The movie is adapted by Moss Hart from the bestseller by the popular author Laura Z Hobson, which she was moved to write from outrage at the way a congressman had called the columnist Walter Winchell a “kike” without anyone raising a murmur. Hobson was Jewish; born Laura Kean Zametkin, she changed her name to get a job as a magazine secretary – a decision that occurs in the film, interestingly transformed. Hart was Jewish, the movie’s producer Darryl Zanuck was a Methodist, Elia Kazan came from a Greek Orthodox background and Peck was raised Catholic. The personal, authorial religious intelligence of this film is Hobson’s.

Hollywood was then rather reticent about mentioning Judaism explicitly, and maybe not much less reticent now. Perhaps one of the few Hollywood movies before this to mention the J-word so prominently was Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in 1940. And the high concept of the film is presented so earnestly, so guilelessly, and with such lack of self-awareness or pre-emptive cynicism that you can’t help but smile at the dramatic moment when the idea is revealed. Peck plays Phil Green, a charming and personable widower with a young son, Tommy (Dean Stockwell); he is a journalist of some repute who has come to New York to take up a job writing for a liberal magazine...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/15/best-picture-oscar-winners-gentlemans-agreement-1947