Despite the presence of such greats as Elia Kazan and Gregory Peck this film gets bogged down in its own unrelenting moralising, which becomes more intrusive and tedious the longer the film runs. This culminates in a predictably po-faced and saccharine ending.

I will not go into the plot, as that is dealt with elsewhere. Suffice it to say, in my opinion it is one to miss.

Exposing Racism Against Jews In late 1940s America
Review date: 2005-11-25 Rating: 10 out of 10

For those who have never experienced the effects of racism it must be difficult to comprehend what that does to a person. This film involves a magazine writer Philip Schuyler Green - played by Gregory Peck - who poses as a Jewish man to find out how people will react. He does this because he has been assigned to write a series of articles on anti-semitism. The way ordinary people react to Green shocks him to the core and underlines the deeply rooted racism against Jews which was present at that time. The most moving scene in the film for me is when Green is confronted by outright racism in a hotel. Director Elia Kazan and producer Darryl F Zanuck took a great risk producing this film and they did so against a backdrop of other well know Jewish film-makers pleading with them not to make it, because they knew the furore that it would produce. In the event Gentlemans Agreement was a hugely successful film and went on to take three Oscars. Gregory Peck paid heavily for his involvement in this film because he was blackballed by one establishment after another for the next twenty years. Gentleman's Agreement is a very powerful film which has not lost any of it’s impact in the past five decades.

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