In his commentary for the DVD of `Gentlemen's Agreement,' critic Richard Schickel spends some of it criticizing the flaws in the movie (something I wish more commentaries would do). Mostly I disagreed with him, especially about Dorothy McGuire's fine performance. She has by far the toughest role in the picture as Gregory Peck's conflicted fiancée, whose complacent belief that she doesn't have an anti-semitic bone in her body is severely tested when he decides to pretend to be Jewish for a newspaper article. I often think of prejudice as the act of automatically assuming something is fact about someone we don't know, based on stereotypical preconceived notions. Anti-semitism is the reference point for the movie, but what it really does is examine the subject of prejudice from many different angles, from its most virulent to its most subtle forms. It even explores the role played by Jewish self-hatred in exacerbating the problem. The only time the film begins to resemble an `After School Special' is in Ann Revere's preachy speech towards the end. On balance, however, `Agreement' is much more complex than it's been given credit for. (I may be too late, but in answer to the User Commenter who wanted to know the name of the main title theme: it's an Alfred Newman original that is only heard that one time in the film. He developed it more extensively a couple of years later in Kazan's "Pinky.")
Review of Gentleman's Agreement
