A quick thread about Gentleman’s Agreement, which I was surprised to find is actually quite good.pic.twitter.com/lFVwBuPxL0
1. Writer, The Nation https://www.thenation.com/authors/jeet-heer/ … 2. email: jeetheer1967 at gmail dot com 3. Twitter essayist 4. Drawn by Joe Ollmann
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A quick thread about Gentleman’s Agreement, which I was surprised to find is actually quite good.pic.twitter.com/lFVwBuPxL0
There are certain things you know will be good going in— John Garfield, Gregory Peck— you know that Elia Kazan will find illuminating ways to express character and emotion through props business, etc. But I was surprised that an old fashioned liberal issue film holds up this well
Almost nothing ages as poorly as yesteryear’s explicitly liberal entertainment, yet Gentleman’s Agreement, because it is about late 40s anti-semitism, tackles a form of discrimination that lives mostly in what we now call implicit bias, and microaggresions.
And its primary target is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. So there’s a way in which it feels much more incisive and prescient about discrimination than many of the embarrassing movies about race that Hollywood has pumped out since.
It helps that the movie is actually written by a Jew. And that that Jew is Moss Hart.
But there *is* a bit of weirdness in the movie. The movie can’t be about a *Jew* who fights against anti-semitism, because its for gentiles. There is a Jew in the movie (played by John Garfield née Julius Garfinkle), but he is largely resigned to live in a world of anti-semitism.
Asking gentiles to root for a Jew against anti-semites would be a bridge too far. Us watching a Jew suffer anti-semitism would be a little too much reality, and our seeing a Jew stand up for himself would be too threatening.
This weirdness culminates in Peck lecturing his (secretly) Jewish secretary about her own self-loathing. Having lived for 8 weeks as a Jew, the white man now of course has mastery of the Jewish experience to such an extent *he can lecture Jews on their own identity*.
the second weirdness is that it’s a movie made in 1947 and no one can even *hint* about the Holocaust. The closest the film comes is when Garfield (playing a WWII vet) makes the argument that smiling politely when someone cracks ethnic jokes is the 1st step towards “all the rest”
Although it gets criticized, I think Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life is essentially right in arguing Shoah awareness was weak in America until the Eichmann trial in early 1960s
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