Delayed Reaction: Gentleman's Agreement

The Pitch: Jew like me.

This film seems pretty quaint these days. It's a cleaned-up, Hays Code-friendly portrayal of discrimination. I can see how it would be important back in 1947. I've listened to a couple You Must Remember This episodes that give this a little more context which helped. Antisemitism was much more rampant back then. It certainly still exists today, but it ranks a lot lower on the current American discrimination chart, so to speak. I supposed the film today would be about a trans-person maybe. That seems like the next barrier. Simply put, the specifics of the film don't hold up because it was never meant to. It was a reaction to the day's circumstances. The broader points it makes hold up, but are pretty obvious.

That's what I'm really curious about. How was this seen back in 1947? My first instinct was to talk about how discrimination is much more nuanced these days and a film as thematically blunt as Gentleman's Agreement wouldn't work because those who are still openly antisemitic have already learned how to tune something like this out and those who are more subtlety antisemitic will agree with the film without confronting their own prejudice. I'm starting to wonder though, in 1947, did Gentleman's Agreement run into the same problem? Were the "gold star" anti semites just immediately dismissive and did everyone else already get the point? Was this movie really controversial or was the controversy hyped up?

Regardless, Gregory Peck is good in it, and that's enough to make it watchable.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend