I am not sure how I feel about this Best Picture winner. I can only imagine that for the late 1940s, this would have been a controversial subject for someone to pose as a minority to see what it was really like. However, looking at this film through my 2012 eyes, it seems really tame.
Gregory Peck plays a man that wants to expose if Jewish people are treated differently than their gentile associates. He discovers that the best way to find this out is to pretend to be Jewish himself. It's not like he could pose as an African American man (see C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man in the 1980s for an awful example of why Gregory Peck did not do it). That and the 1940s probably was not ready for a movie that portrayed African Americans as real people.
The woman Peck is dating is so unlikeable. What did he see in her exactly? Celeste Holm was on a show I used to watch with my mom and grandmother so it was amazing to me to see her as a young, vibrant blonde.
It was an okay movie but nothing special. I imagine now we could push the envelope a little more about the ill treatment of any given minority. It was good to see that someone in the 1940s was trying to show there was injustice in the country. Maybe it was not explosive but at least someone made an effort.
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