All this time I've been unfairly nursing a grudge against Elia Kazan:
Gentleman's Agreement was like an illustration for Cosmopolitan magazine. Everyone was prettified. It was a series of clichés. But try to put yourself back in American films in 1946 where the word 'Jew' was never mentioned before. For the first time someone said that America is full of anti-semitism, both conscious and unconscious and among the best and most liberal people. That was then a much bolder statement than it is now. In that sense the picture broke some new ground, and Zanuck, Hart and I can take some credit. It was saying to the audience: 'You are an average American and you are anti-semitic. Anti-semitism is in you.' [...]
The problem of course was that Garfield was like a regular Wasp, nobody could look nicer than him to the audience, he had no defects, you could not but love him. And in that context, a person like Garfield would have a certain bitterness that would make him not so pretty. And Dorothy McGuire's character was beyond saying! But everything, the photography, the processing, the costumes, the hairdressing, was made to look Hollywood. [...] [T]he heroine lived in the most expensive house in Manhattan, [...] a house that only millionaires can afford. So she is a millionairess because it is glamorous to be rich. At the end, nobody in the audience is left with an unpleasant taste. Somewhere in the middle of it they are shocked a little bit, but I think they were able to get out of it, to say: 'Not me, I am not concerned.' [...]
[I]t was an expensive production, a Zanuck 'personal' production, with expensive stars and everybody had to look 'good'. I think there is this air of pleasantness in Gentleman's Agreement ... It is just a pleasant fucking picture. Everybody has this little problem of anti-semitism that keeps coming up and disturbing their relationship.
--Michel Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (1973), p.57-59
Racism 101
Skyler Green (Gregory Peck) pretends to be Jewish so he can convincingly write an exposé of antisemitism. His piece is not intended as a profile of the kind of racist who joins "white power" groups, but of the tacitly accepted, everyday racism of the majority.
This translates to an hour and a half of one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant chastising other white Anglo-Saxon Protestants for their lack of consideration: it's a study in self-righteous indignation. Ironically, as the prejudice against which Green rails is expressed chiefly by the women in his life -- fiancée Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), secretary -- his condescension is likewise expressed to them, tainting the production, however unconsciously, with a patina of sexism.
To me, in this city, Gentleman's Agreement seems dated and irrelevant, but comments I've read around the Web suggest that there are many places where its lessons are immediately applicable. Either way, it's painfully, clumsily earnest, and with little in the way of technical merit to compensate. Why bother?