Gregory Peck

Thanks to his iconic role as Atticus Finch in the classic American film To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck remains one of the most recognizable actors of his generation. But Atticus Finch is hardly Peck’s only famous role. He played a smitten journalist opposite Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, a besieged lawyer in Cape Fear, and an aged Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. Peck had a five-decade career in film spanning several genres, including drama, comedy, romance, Westerns and even horror. Over the past year, I’ve watched seven Gregory Peck movies for the first time. A couple of them were fairly forgettable, at least to me, but I wouldn’t say any of them were bad.

I’ve chosen two of the best of the seven to write about in this post. First, one of Peck’s earliest leading roles, a magazine feature writer taking on antisemitism in Gentleman’s Agreement. Peck plays Phil Green, a widower who moves to New York City with his ailing mother and his young son to write for a major magazine. His editor asks him to expose everyday antisemitism for his first assignment. It’s important to note that the film was released in 1947, just a few years after a world war was fought partially over the Nazi’s treatment of Jews in Europe, and a year before the establishment of Israel as the Jewish state.

Despite having just spent unprecedented amounts blood and treasure to stopping Hitler and his Holocaust, there was still significant antisemitic feeling in the United States. Few Americans would have supported open violence against Jews, but more subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination were still widespread. Green struggles to come up with a way to write about it, however, while he gets his family settled and gets to know his editor’s attractive niece. Around the same time that he decides he’s in love with her, he strikes upon the idea to pretend to be Jewish in order to experience antisemitism firsthand.

In some ways, the plot of the rest of the film is fairly predictable. The decision to pretend to be Jewish has consequences, not just for Green, but for his son, his mother and particularly for his new fiancé. Green experiences prejudice from unexpected sources and is able to write a well-received article for the magazine.

Within that plot framework, however, the film deals with the moral complexity of prejudice exceptionally well, particularly through the relationship between Green and his fiancé, Kathy, played by Dorothy McGuire. Initially, Kathy supports the endeavor, but as it begins to affect her social life, she balks. Green is disappointed in Kathy, for giving in to her friends’ prejudice and seeks comfort from a sympathetic female colleague. A lesser film might have condemned Kathy as an antisemite, and developed a romantic relationship between Green and his colleague. Instead, Green and Kathy have difficult conversations and both characters go through believable growth and are able to save their relationship. But both characters’ ongoing shortcomings are still acknowledged. It is a recognition that prejudice is part of the human condition and that well-meaning people must continue to reflect on their own thoughts and behavior in order to combat their own prejudices.

The second Peck film I’ve chosen to write about, 1958’s The Big Country, also tries to deal with moral complexity, but I don’t think it was as successful. The movie follows a former sea captain, James McKay, who moves from the east to his new fiancé’s Texas ranch and becomes involved in a blood feud between his fiancé’s family and their neighbors. From the moment McKay (Peck) arrives at the ranch his clothing and manners make him a target of ridicule by the ranchers and other townspeople. They are led by Steve Leech, a ranch hand played by Charlton Heston, and a rival for the affections of McKay’s fiancé, Patricia.

Leech repeatedly challenges McKay’s masculinity and physical abilities. McKay refuses to accept the challenges on Leech’s terms in front of Patricia. Perhaps I’m projecting too much of myself, or at least modern sensibilities in general on to McKay, but it seemed to me that these scenes were designed to show the triumph of reason over violence and machismo. But each time McKay made a principled stand in public, he went back and accepted the challenges privately. When confronted about this toward the end of the movie, he explains that he only had to prove his strength to himself, and no one else. That seemed like a pretty flimsy explanation to me. Each time he accepted the challenges privately, it felt to me like a betrayal of the principles McKay had been standing for.

It was particularly ridiculous when he accepted Leech’s challenge to a fistfight. The two men go out into a field and fight bare-knuckled for hours. Now, I mean no offense to Gregory Peck, but no one could take more than a few full-strength, bare-knuckle punches from Charlton Heston at his physical peak. To be fair, I don’t think Heston could take that many punches from Peck either. It’s a typically ridiculous Western fight scene, but in a film that seems to be trying to send a more reasonable, non-violent message, it feels very out of place.

Ultimately, McKay is able to end the blood feud between Patricia’s family and their neighbors by buying the land they both want access to and promising that they will both be able to use it. In the process he has to participate in a duel, several people die in a firefight and McKay falls in love with a different woman and dumps Patricia.

As flawed as the movie was, it was still enjoyable. Movies are a medium in which easy answers often come, well, too easily. After all, filmmakers usually only have 90-150 minutes to tell their stories. It is genuinely more difficult to deal with complexity in film than it is in written literature. Gregory Peck is one of a very few actors who always tried to deal with serious issues in his roles. While he was definitely more successful in Gentleman’s Agreement than in The Big Country, I appreciate the effort in both films.