The shabby cruelties of anti-Semitism which were sharply and effectively revealed within the restriated observation of Laura Z. Hobson's "Gentleman's Agreement" have now been exposed with equal candor and even greater dramatic forcefulness in the motion-picture version of the novel which came to the Mayfair yesterday. In fact, every point about prejudice which Miss Hobson had to make in her book has been made with superior illustration and more graphic demonstration in the film, so that the sweep of her moral indignation is not only widened but intensified thereby.
So begins Bosley Crowther’s 1947 New York Times review of the film “Gentleman's Agreement.” The drama opens with widowed journalist Phil Green who, by invitation of a magazine publisher, decides to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism. To humanize his work, Green decided to go undercover, as a Jew. He becomes Phil Greenberg. Crowther explains,
Essentially, Miss Hobson's was a story of the emotional disturbance that occurs within a man who elects, for the sake of getting a magazine article, to tell people that he is a Jew and who experiences first-hand, as a consequence, the shock and pain of discriminations and social snubs. And it was the story of this same man's parallel romance with a supposedly unbigoted girl who, for all her intellectual convictions, can't quite shake the vicious prejudices of her particular group.
The movie was released at an important time not only for cinematic history, but for general American history. Prior to World War II, Richard Gilliam explains, Hollywood had an unspoken rule that anti-Semitism could only be hinted at. “Gentlemen’s Agreement” changed this tradition and permitted films to “admit that racial and ethnic prejudice is more active in our society than we may want to admit.”
It began when Darryl F. Zanuck decided to produce the film after being refused membership to the Los Angeles Country Club when they wrongly assumed he was Jewish. Before the filming began, prominent producer Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish film executives pleaded with Zanuck not to produce the film out of worry that it would “stir up trouble.” They also warned Zanuck that film censor Joseph Breen would not permit the release of the film given that he had been known to make negative statements about Jews.
Despite the concerns of what was then a small Hollywood Jewish community, Zanuck decided to produce the film anyway, releasing a successful film that in addition to showcasing the anti-Semitism that plagued the Jews of the time, eroded the censorship of an issue that remains problematic to this day.
