Taken as a triptych focused on various social problems, the Academy Award-winning pictures of the year for the period 1945-1947 are a Hollywood statement about tolerance in the wake of World War II. Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend began the movement with an alcoholic's struggle against his substance abuse in the bars of New York City. Then William Wyler released his tale of family connections complicated by soldiers reintegrating themselves into the civilian world of The Best Years of Our Lives. Finally, Elia Kazan released his then-daring expose about anti-Semitism with Gentleman's Agreement before moving on to more self-consciously theatrical, and more artistically satisfying, films like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront.

At first the story of one man's awakening into the realities of social prejudice, Gentleman's Agreement is equally a treatise on fighting against the expression of such unfairness and cruelty. In this proscription for taking action rather than adding to the silent majority who let prejudice expand through thoughts and feelings, the film voices a political concern about eradicating bias from everyday life. In so doing it's the most overt of the three movies of the year concerning its pressing social ill and this purpose makes its somehow more informative yet less entertaining than its predecessors.

Opening as widower Phil Green (Gregory Peck) walks through Midtown Manhattan with his son Tommy (Dean Stockwell), he visits his editor's office as a journalist newly arrived in the Big Apple to write for a liberal magazine. Assigned his first topic with a think piece about anti-Semitism the perspective of the article remains illusive until he stumbles into the proper inspiration.

As someone unknown to anyone else in New York, save to his mother, son, editor and his editor's niece Kathy Lacey (Dorothy McGuire) with whom he begins a love affair, Green tells everyone he's a Jew to see what happens. Never played as a practical joke he simply wishes to find out the socio-cultural limits and glass ceilings of being Phil Green versus "Phil Greenberg", as his pseudonymous existence. Moved by secretary's story about concealing her Jewishness to land a good job with his magazine and also troubled by her expressed anti-Semitism despite being a Jew, Green evolves into a champion for the cause of open-mindedness.

Along the way his relationship with Kathy is complicated by her practical insulation from balder expressions of prejudice due to her wealth. She's simply too intelligent to disregard her station in life as socially advantageous just as she's overwhelmed by exactly how to stop injustice wherever she finds it. When Tommy comes under attack by school kids who call him a "kike" even though he's neither ethnically or religiously Jewish, a breach between Kathy and Phil is forced that depends on their mutual conviction to an absolute moral and ethical good.

Eventually Green's childhood friend Dave Goldman (John Garfield) arrives to enlighten Green's journey into the heart of anti-Semitism that has gone far beyond what was first imagined. Relying on his Jewish army officer friend who is looking for a new home in New York to support his family, Green is inspired to fight intolerance whenever he chances upon it.

Bolstered by righteous motives and fortified by Dave's support, if not his troubled, blueblood fiancé, Green writes his three-part article describing anti-Semitism that's riven through society at every level, high and low. He reports on often-repeated ethnic jokes and slurs, describes how his vacation reservations were refused because of his presumed heritage and he points out the false stereotypes often used to characterize his temporary identity. Plus he recognizes the aspects of anti-Semitism that are particularly hard to root out since so much of what builds the bias in the first place is an arbitrary hierarchy of worth with Jewishness being a clear indicator of that which is unwanted in America.

This point is somewhat ironic when given certain Allied motives for entering into World War II. Never heavy-handed in this regard, Gentleman's Agreement becomes the occasion to examine the kinds of collusion that made the Final Solution possible despite the majority of good people in a given society who would resist such bald destruction save for their habits of silence and indifference.

By film's end Phil Green's sense of righteous purpose finally rings true for Kathy as she realizes how to live up to her conscience when given the alternative that disrupts not only her love life but also her convictions about how the world should behave. Instead of standing by for every slur, joke or social custom she finds offensive, she finds the will to resist whatever she thinks is wrong. Taken from Green's own rulebook she lets Dave and his family take over her home as an affront to the "gentleman's agreement" concerning Jews and their place in society and in her act of selflessness she cements her bond with Green to live happily ever after.

No doubt troubled by the film's proposed topic, various Hollywood studio chiefs, themselves Jews, are rumored to have approached producer Darryl F. Zanuck and asked him to avoid making Gentleman's Agreement. Fearing its themes as being too incendiary and controversial for the times it was their preference to deal with anti-Semitism more quietly by insulating themselves behind a screen of wealth and prestige. Rightfully recognizing the underlying motive for their request as being the whole point of his film, Zanuck refused to kowtow to his erstwhile bosses. He then went on to produce the picture as an adaptation of Laura Z. Hobson's novel written for the screen by Moss Hart and realized under the direction of consummate craftsman Elia Kazan.

Striking an immediate cord with audiences who were moved by post-War revelations about the Holocaust and frightened by the witch-hunts of the Cold War in the late 1940s, Gentleman's Agreement was a socially responsible film of the highest order. It showcased Gregory Peck flexing his leading man muscles and inspired righteous conduct in the face of a more personal enemy than the massed forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Likewise it was a turning away from international affairs and war torn landscapes to domestic troubles and interpersonal problems. Rooting out injustice became the purpose of a new idealism within the film's worldview and, possibly, in American more generally that was meant to promote complete, and unfettered, social equality.

Of course these lofty ambitions were immediately dated by a number of platitudes in the film best described as quite pedantic. Though Green is charismatic as he navigates an assumed identity, he has only to reveal his gentile birthright to escape his persecution at the hands of people who should really know better. This limits his valid and troubling discoveries about the expression of prejudice because he remains, from the first, a Christian hero somewhat apart from the Semite he presumes himself to be.

In fact, it's this implicit bias of the film's plot that points out how intolerance propagates through society as a bridge between this picture of the year winner and its reminder of history in the context of all future screenings. However, this isn't to say Kazan's movie is particularly brilliant even though it realizes the remarkable penetration of social bias and all equally damaging forms of prejudice in the very fabric of daily life.

Gentleman's Agreement was nominated for the Best Motion Picture Oscar against the relatively slight comedy The Bishop's Wife by Henry Koster, the gritty Ed Dmytryk thriller Crossfire, David Lean's first star turn as cinematic master in Great Expectations and the crowd-pleasing, Natalie Wood-starring Miracle on 34th Street by George Seaton. Alternate titles for this illustrious group of five might also have included Jacques Tourneur's criminally unrecognized noir picture Out of the Past or Charlie Chaplin's most complete sound film Monsieur Verdoux as the story of a grifter who marries women and kills them for their money.

Despite these other fine films the Academy saw fit to name its movie of the year for 1947 as the capstone to a mid-1940s trio of illustrations about social ills on the way to a better America. As the final title in this triptych, Gentleman's Agreement is the most provocative and socially responsible film of the three. But it's also the least entertaining save for its resonance today with a wicked point-of-view about anti-Semitism.