Rent Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

The Prejudice You Don’t See Coming - Gentleman's Agreement review by griggs

I went into this expecting a well-meaning relic, the sort of “eat your vegetables” classic that gets assigned rather than discovered. Instead, I found myself pulled along by a film that keeps its footing even when it teeters toward melodrama. Every time the emotions swell, Gentleman’s Agreement seems to recognise the danger and reels itself back in, landing with far more honesty and bite than I anticipated.

Elia Kazan builds the story around a simple but potent conceit: a journalist posing as Jewish to expose the casual, everyday cruelties most people prefer to dodge. It’s the kind of setup that could have aged disastrously—my early fear was an earnest proto–Black Like Me experiment—but the film sidesteps that trap. It never leans on caricature or ritual; it sticks to language, behaviour, and the small humiliations that reveal who people really are. It even wades, surprisingly gracefully, into the trickier waters of assimilation, Zionism, and the politics of Palestine, making a quietly firm distinction between being Jewish and being a Zionist and pushing back against the lazy assumption that identity and ideology march in lockstep.

Gregory Peck anchors everything with that steady, clear-eyed moral certainty he does so well, but it’s the supporting cast that enriches the drama. Dorothy McGuire’s conflicted performance gives the film its emotional tension, while Celeste Holm more or less steals the pages she’s in—sharp, warm, and far more attuned to the world than anyone wants to admit.

For a so-called forgotten Best Picture winner, it’s remarkably sharp, humane, and still uncomfortably relevant—less a museum piece than a mirror we’d rather look away from.