A Farewell to Peck 

I always feel a slight guilt when an old Hollywood star dies. I feel I’m enjoying it too much.

Death allows us to get sentimental, but it’s usually mixed with pain. When celebrities die, however, there is little pain. We can just wallow in the memories of their public images. Even the slight pang is not unpleasant. There is more celebration than mourning about it. So it is with Gregory Peck.

I was never a Peck fan. I found him stiff and monotonous. Even his warmest admirers wouldn’t call him a versatile actor; he usually played the same earnest character, photogenic and resonant to a fault. Critics chuckled that he played Captain Ahab, in the 1956 film of Moby Dick, like Abraham Lincoln with a peg leg.

The word Lincolnesque was hauled out again for his Academy Award-winning performance in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. As the mildly liberal Southern lawyer, he delivered his lines with his characteristic tone — steady, unruffled bombast — but without a trace of Southern flavor.

In another famous role, in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Peck played a journalist posing as a Jew in order to expose prejudice; he didn’t seem the least bit Jewish, and when I saw the film again a few years ago, with a largely Jewish audience, it had turned into a comedy: Peck’s solemn acting — more like preaching, really — brought down the house.

All in all, Peck’s movies weren’t that bad; when he wasn’t miscast, he filled the bill passably. He belonged to a period when Hollywood stars and their studios liked to keep their images simple, unblemished, and heroic; think of Charlton Heston, Peck’s co-star in The Big Country (1958), one of those epic Westerns of yore (Peck made more than his share of them).

But when I watched him act, I always yearned for a little deflating irony. His relentlessly noble demeanor could make you root for the villain.

That nearly happened in Cape Fear (also in 1962), a melodrama saved by Robert Mitchum as the mocking sadist who not only terrorizes Peck’s family but brings Peck’s lawyer-hero down to his own bestial level. For once Peck played a less-than-perfect character, and it was a refreshing change. The picture belongs to Mitchum, virile, scary, and amusing, but Peck manages to show the dark side absent from most of his work.

One of Peck’s most interesting films, rarely seen now, is Alfred Hitchcock’s Paradine Case (1948), which I happened to watch again just this week. In this one Peck is a lawyer who falls in love with a beautiful client (Alida Valli) who is accused of murdering her husband. Convinced of her innocence, he alarms his wife (Ann Todd) with his zeal to exonerate her. But his efforts backfire bitterly when his client pulls the rug out from under him. It’s not that Peck’s acting is particularly distinguished, but Hitchcock, with a good plot, makes the best use of his qualities.

Peck was one of the last relics of the old Hollywood star system, in which stars weren’t expected to delve into the characters they played. That began to change a half-century ago with the advent of Marlon Brando, the anti-Peck. Good looks and deep voices became boring, stagy. Masculinity acquired an edge Peck never had; film acting became “serious.” Stanislavsky had arrived in posh Beverly Hills.

You have only to watch a couple of Peck films to understand why the young Brando was so exciting. Brando, now pushing 80 (and 400 pounds), isn’t that much younger than Peck, but he has never become what you’d call venerable. He continues to defy respectability, if it still exists (and if it doesn’t, he’s one of the reasons). It’s hard to imagine Peck scratching himself or cussing on the screen. He might play a Nazi, but never the leader of a motorcycle gang.

Peck was not so much an actor as a standard ingredient in the old Hollywood recipe — the leading man as Eagle Scout. Even when he was Doctor Mengele, you felt that, whatever his shortcomings, he might make a good husband. He communicated neither humor nor danger, just a durable sort of decency.

It’s admittedly not much of a eulogy, but you’d rather your daughter married Gregory Peck than Marlon Brando.

Joseph Sobran