Tuesday, September 20, 2005
TRACT
Moss Hart adapted and Elia Kazan directed this version of Laura Z. Hobson's
This is one of those NYTimes Best Films that is on one list and not another.
A split decision.
Same reaction here. Some of this film is brilliantly done and insightful. It tries to touch on the more subtle nature of anti-semitism. Any 'minority' group could be substituted really. It is that twist on the 'some of my best friends are......' attitude that many minorities run into.
It is about the small instances we let slide whether we are IN the group or out of the group being defamed. No stand taken.
It is pretty good.
I think that there is still some pretty virulent anti-semitism but not where this film shows it. The Jews have done a good job of fighting back.
When I went to MIT, there were Jewish dormitory sections. I think not because of assignment but because the Jewish kids clubbed together and formed small ghettos. This was ten years later than the film.
I ended up in one of these enclaves and experienced reverse discrimination of a sort. I was still a good boy christian at the time and didn't mind showing it. I got some flack.
I am actually grateful to these boys for shaking me out of my non-thinking Babbit-y ways. So it was a different thing entirely. No parallel with the real anti-semitism that existed.
All of these guys, though feisty about it, had felt the scorn and ridicule and apartness. I learned a lot by being with it all.
And MIT was a bastion of human rights (still is) at the time. The campus was crawling with all sorts of minorities. Hillel Society was a big deal.
Anyway, it is hard to take myself back to the time that this film came out. There was one Jewish kid in my whole 12 graded consolidated country school. He took some shit.
Gregory Peck is the journalist who decides to 'live as a Jew' for 8 weeks. Somehow, this rankled me. He could and did get out of it. Dorothy Malone is a limousine liberal that he falls in love with. All of their romantic troubles center around his being 'too serious' about it all. She is a foil. John Garfield, always welcome, is the only card carrying Jew in the film. He provides gritty reality when needed. And, in her role as the good buddy, also-ran romantic interest, Celeste Holm once again demonstrates that she owns that territory all to herself; witty, wry, and warm as always.
I will give this a 3 out of Netflix5 because some of it is implausible and it doesn't cut very deep. The acting is mixed. And at times it sounded like a human rights training film.
