Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Week 5: Greg Peck

In part 1 of this update, let's talk about a pair of movies starring possibly my all-time favorite actor, Gregory Peck:

  • Gentleman's Agreement (Won 1947)
  • Twelve O'Clock High (Nominated 1949)

In Gentleman's Agreement, Gregory Peck is a magazine writer and widowed father who is assigned to write an expose about anti-semitism. This movie won Best Picture in 1947. It might be the closest historical precedent to Crash winning in 2005, except, at least this movie has the redeeming factor of Gregory Peck being in it. His performance is as stern and sincere as any of his characters, e.g. Atticus Finch, Captain Ahab; and the supporting cast is just O.K. I found that the film was written so as to be more of a personal journey for the main character than a real exploration of antisemitism. In completing the assignment, Peck's character attempts to put himself in the shoes of a Jew for weeks on end, and in the process briefly alienates his love interest, who is not overtly anti-semitic, but is also not bending over backwards to cure her own prejudices.

I've read that this film was originally supposed to be about homophobia rather than antisemitism. There was probably only so much one could do in 1940's Hollywood. I give Gentleman's Agreement a respectable 6.9.

Gregory Peck was busy in the 1940's. Busy being awesome.

We get more traditional fare in Twelve O'Clock High, which also stars Peck, this time as an Air Force general assigned to a (pre-Normandy) World War 2 bomber outfit that is down on its morale. He's believable as a hard-as-nails military leader who forces his pilots and crewmen to eschew self-pity for brazen pride. Imagine a more redeemable (and slimmer, taller) version of George C. Scott's Patton. 

I loved Twelve O'Clock High for its sheer devotion to the subject matter of tactical bombing. The writing, photography and character development are equal partners with the underlying subject matter. Somehow, the movie maintains pace despite most dialogue and action occurring on the ground. The movie climaxes with a bombing run where original film is married with actual footage from WW2 dogfights, and, somehow, it doesn't seem all that dated, and it is far more exciting than what a movie today is likely to do, i.e., invent some CGI sequences that turn out to look like a video game. Score for this movie: 8.3.

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