Cites ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’

I found Eric Goldman’s article on Hollywood’s lack of films about Jews for the past 75 years very interesting. I remember one notable exception: “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” a 1948 film about anti-Semitism directed by Elia Kazan and starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and John Garfield. Peck plays a journalist who decides to pretend he is Jewish so that he can write about anti-Semitism with real knowledge of what it feels like to be on the receiving end. He then writes an article titled “I was a Jew for six weeks.” This film was quite unusual for its time, since it dealt with issues that were rarely spoken of publicly. Unfortunately, “Gentlemen’s Agreement” was banned by the Catholic Church, allegedly because, in the picture, the journalist’s fiancée mentions that she had been divorced.

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