It's hard for today's audience to appreciate the impact of Gentlemen's Agreement in 1947. The Holocaust was not in textbooks then, it was in newsreels showed in American theaters. The state of Israel was coming into being and there was debate about that with Harry Truman shortly overruling a lot of his own trusted advisers including his own Secretary of State George C. Marshall, in giving recognition to the nascent Jewish state.
During the course of the film names like Gerald L.K. Smith, Theodore G. Bilbo, and John E. Rankin are mentioned. The first was a Protestant evangelical minister who started out with Huey Long, but then developed a line of anti-Semitism in his sermons. He had a considerably large following back in the day though the Holocaust did a lot in killing his recruiting. Theodore G. Bilbo and John E. Rankin were a couple of Mississippi politicians who for their redneck constituency successfully linked anti-Semitism and racism. They didn't like foreign born either and used a whole lot of ethnic slurs.
But the anti-Semitism that Gregory Peck takes on is not that of Bilbo, Smith, and Rankin. It's the genteel country club anti-Semitism that manifests itself in restricted resorts, quotas as to how many Jews will some white shoe law firm accept if any, discrimination in hiring practices, unspoken covenants {gentlemen's agreements} not to sell to Jews in certain areas; all these we see in Gentlemen's Agreement.
Peck is given an assignment to write about it and he hits on a novel approach. Just being hired by publisher Albert Dekker, he gets Dekker's backing when he says he will pretend he's Jewish and see how he's being treated. He gets quite an experience in the bargain.
Running parallel to Peck's masquerade is his courtship of Dorothy McGuire. She's a divorcée, he's a widower with a young son. The whole thing puts a strain on their relationship, especially in dealing with her sister, Jane Wyatt who lives in one of those restricted by Gentlemen's Agreement communities.
Gentlemen's Agreement came up with several nominations and three Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director to Elia Kazan, and Best Supporting Actress to Celeste Holm as a tart tongued fashion writer at Peck's magazine who proves to be a friend. Peck himself was nominated for Best Actor, but lost to Ronald Colman for A Double Life. Holm also beat out Anne Revere nominated for the same film, probably helped by the fact that Revere had won a few years earlier for National Velvet.
John Garfield who was Jewish took a small supporting role in the film as Peck's long time childhood friend who educates Peck into how a Jew deals with the rebuffs he's finding out about. Had he not been up also for Body and Soul as Best Actor, he might well have earned a Supporting Actor nomination here.
Also note Sam Jaffe as the fictional professor Lieberman which is a thinly veiled caricature of Albert Einstein probably the most noted figure in the world of Jewish background. Like Lieberman, Einstein's a cultural Jew, not religious in any sense of the word. Nevertheless he was a leading figure at the time in the Zionist movement, having endured all that Peck endured in Germany and seeing what was coming with Hitler, fled his native Germany for safe harbor in the USA.
My favorite character in the film however has always been June Havoc as Peck's secretary. She changed her name to something ethnically neutral to get her job in the very magazine that will now crusade against anti-Semitism. She's also become a self hater, a phenomenon that other discriminated people also experience. GLBT activists are fully aware of what self hate has done, not hardly unknown among other groups as Ms. Havoc demonstrates.
Of course Gentlemen's Agreement is dated with its topical references to post World War II trends and events. Yet it still has a powerful message to deliver. It made Gregory Peck one of the great liberal icons of Hollywood and still should be seen by all as a great lesson in the pitfalls of unreasoning hate.
