IF ANYONE wants to quickly identify a male screen star whose collected films define and explore needed qualities of moral strength, virtue and intelligence, as well as mental stress and reformed behaviour, it is Gregory Peck.
Taken as a whole, his collected films represent one of the deepest, most thorough and practical explorations of social and subjective conduct which define human life anywhere.
Peck’s career as a screen star offers concentrated evidence of classic Hollywood’s ability to provide indispensable intelligent (and also quite exciting in a variety of ways) films since the 1920s which construct positive social insight for those who desire to pay more than habitual lip service towards desiring and influencing better actions from individuals, groups, or society on the whole.
Peck’s unique dramatic contribution rests on how he projects himself on screen as a plausible, real exemplary alternative to someone who may merely lecture or preach, or speechify about a society’s or nation’s or the world’s problems. The thing is, Peck’s roles contain within them realistic mental human twists and turns, procrastinations, contemplation, fears, doubts etc, before they emerge with any moral or intelligent position which fosters confidence in viewers.

Educated origins

Perhaps we should focus on Peck’s origin as a Californian, growing up in a State long famous for its liberal pursuits in the Arts, Sciences, social theories, etc, which influenced his exemplary roles in cinematic art. We can also learn something of how artists transfer some of their experiences from outside their acting career, to the overall value of their eventual style.
Peck was a pre-Med student, as well as a degree holding graduate of the University of California, and he brought a sense of human sympathy, understanding, and concern, all associated with the medical profession, combined with an educated rational, peace-loving, and virtuous attitude to most of his roles. To add further strength to this noticeable motivation behind his acting is the fact that he emerged rapidly as a star in 1945, during a surge of innovative independent Hollywood film productions, when outstanding individual producers were given free legal reign to financially support screen roles and films which demonstrated an open-minded progression in content and form.
Peck began his Hollywood career in 1944 with one such film, ‘THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM’, directed by the rookie director John Stahl. The film ultimately showed amazing foresight in projecting China as a progressive modern republic in the making, where Peck acts as a Roman Catholic missionary in the country’s early turbulent 20th Century history. Interestingly, the film’s producers gave in to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s OWI Film Advisory Board, which had objected strongly to the film’s original screenplay which portrayed China as a backward place of rampaging warlords, and re-wrote it as a civilization of high standards awakening as a modern nation. No doubt, Peck agreed with this revision, and today we can say that ‘THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM’, a classic Hollywood production, was one of the first, if not the first, films to envision and influence China as the modernized society it has become.

Distinctive style

With ‘SPELLBOUND’ of 1945, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, one of several outstanding British directors who had come over to Hollywood, Peck achieved instant stardom as the man affected by amnesia and depression, needing to come to grips with himself, and his lover, played beautifully by Ingrid Bergman. ‘SPELLBOUND’ was another independent production by what would become one of Hollywood’s most original and innovative companies: United Artists, or simply UA. The film obviously touched the public’s need to see serene, honest, genuine ‘un-dramatic’, or ‘un-exaggerated’ performances, reflecting inner human conflicts of the mind, especially at a time when the traumatic effects of the mentally devastating World War II were reflected in returning servicemen and women affected by terribly violent memories in a domestic civilian environment new to such repercussions.
The next year, 1946, saw Peck in his first great negative, villainous role in ‘DUEL IN THE SUN’, which however implies a positive flipside by thoroughly exploring and revealing the social and psychological attitude of a debased character. ‘DUEL IN THE SUN’ is an adult Western, meaning a Western with far deeper human meaning and significance than a typical ‘cowboy’ film.
Peck, in this film, began a profound revelation of racism as well as social and ethnic bigotries that he would sustain in at least four other brilliant films, namely ‘GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT’ of 1947, ‘THE PURPLE PLAIN’ of 1954, ‘THE BIG COUNTRY’ of 1958, and ‘TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD’ of 1962. But in ‘Duel in the Sun’ — a hallmark Hollywood film of amazing cinematography, highly artistic colour combinations and structural scenery, directed by the legendary King Vidor — Peck demonstrated the ongoing importance of a theme relevant way beyond  North America or the Americas in general, especially in other countries where the presence of miscegenated individuals, particularly women, may bring to the fore contradictory feelings of physical attraction, but also forbidden love and secure family acceptance.
Peck, as the wild handsome white cowboy, son of a wealthy dogmatic rancher, falls for the beautiful mestizo orphan girl (played unforgettably by Jennifer Jones) taken into their home as a servant by his mother (played by the great Lilian Gish). He begins to sleep with her, but eventually rebuffs her desire for marriage and a home after promising such intentions, in obedience to his father who advises him that a person of such racial and social origin or stock should only be a plaything, and not taken seriously.
The film would penetrate deeply into a theme that reflects the reality of living in the New World of the entire Americas, while on a personal level, it represents the necessity of family members having the ability to think for themselves, beyond the dictates of racial or ethnic preservations as an unquestionable priority.

Gentleman’s Agreement

1947 saw Peck expand on the theme by appearing in the film which came to define his distinct ability to consistently uphold virtue, fair-mindedness, , professionalism, and sensitive intelligence on screen, ‘GENTLEMAN”S AGREEMENT’, directed by the renowned Elia Kazan and co-starring Dorothy McGuire and John Garfield as Peck’s close friends, is not simply a film exposing all the insidious tricks of anti-Semitism in 1940s Americas, but an unspecific theoretical attack on secretive internal human bigotry, and its concocted external manifestations.
The film’s genius exists in the fact that its Jewish victims of prejudice can hardly be recognized as distinct from white Gentiles, so their problem of social barriers only become imposed, based on the sudden or eventual revelation that one is of a certain human lineage. The error of such a barrier is that one is not judged on the basis of one’s internally possessed identity and individual character. This is the reason why ‘GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT’ is largely considered one of the most important films ever made, because of its exposure of social barriers which may occur based on mere information on someone’s birth, education, class, sexual, religious, political, or artistic affiliation.
Such prejudicial barriers can occur among any group of races or ethnicities anywhere. Again, it is the film ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ which ITSELF represents a culture of open-minded rational behaviour, not any message it carries from a prior social establishment. Peck’s task as a journalist exposes even the prejudices which exist on the very magazine which hired him to expose prejudice, and also the prejudice of his girlfriend’s family members and social circle.
The film also shows that individuals cannot be regarded as automatically ‘good’ or ‘un-bigoted’ simply because they belong to a certain cultural, religious, political, ethnic or racial family group.

Qualities and achievements

Like all actors of quality, Gregory Peck possessed a certain distinct emphatic voice; a tone and diction which could bring home a point or deflate its opposition. We also find this quality in Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Sidney Poitier, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and others.
Peck’s other distinguishing acting quality is the quirky and surprising shifts of temperament which sustain his virtue, or rediscover it. We see this in that stunning original classic Western of 1948:’YELLOW SKY’, where, as the dirty, lusty outlaw leader who discovers a ghost town of hidden gold in the wilderness, inhabited only by a wildcat pretty young woman and her old prospecting father, Peck, hurt by the girl’s rebuffs and insults about his crude conduct and lack of hygiene, begins to reform seriously.
In ‘TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH’ of 1950, as the squadron leader wracked with sympathy and concern for the dangerous task of his men, Peck’s performance would rocket him again at the box-office, and make this film one of the great classics of cinematic civilized sensitivity and responsibility. Similarly, his authentic portrayal of a remorseful man exposed to heartless, stubborn condemnation, rumour and harassment in ‘THE GUNFIGHTER’, also of 1950, made this one of the best and most socially touching classic Westerns ever made.
Yet Peck could be charmingly lighthearted, playful and clever, as in ‘ROMAN HOLIDAY’ of 1953, where, as the poor journalist in Rome, he discovers Audrey Hepburn is really a princess incognito who wants to be a bohemian for a while.
Whatever the role, they wake up our capacity for a decent civilized response, and this gives his collected films vital social importance. In ‘THE BRAVADOS’ of 1958, Peck doggedly tracks down and kills three outlaws who apparently raped and killed his wife, only to find they did not; instead, it was a least suspected man known to him.
In ‘THE BIG COUNTRY’ of ‘58 as well, also one of his best Westerns which he helped to produce with director William Wyler, Peck’s sane caution comes between two rival ranchers of different class in a huge territory. His humble civil manner makes him the odd-man-out, and the brunt of jokes and abuse in an egotistic ‘nationalistic’ territory, where those who are quiet, studious, reasonable and carefully intelligent are threatened by the hasty, crude interpretations, attitudes, and behaviour of others.
In ‘CAPE FEAR’ of ‘62, Peck is the judge who becomes the object of revenge by a brutal but clever, jealous criminal he once sentenced, and who hates his virtuous social stance. But ‘THE PURPLE PLAIN’ of 1954 is probably one of Peck’s most beautiful, precious and rare films, where, in the steamy tropical jungle of Burma in World War II, he finds himself wracked with malaria, and branded a coward while in love with a native Burmese girl.
Sometimes his role reveals the emptiness of suburban bourgeois life, memories of infidelity more enjoyable than married life becomes a secret pleasure, as in that unconventional Hollywood classic,  ‘MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT’ of 1956.
And so, the films people love with Gregory Peck, such as ‘THE GUNS OF NAVERONE’, ‘TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD’, ‘ON THE BEACH’, ‘BELOVED INFIDEL’ where he sensitively played the famous American writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘MOBY DICK, ‘THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL’ ‘OLD GRINGO’ etc, have added up to one of the most socially valuable film oeuvres on the exploration of virtue and intelligence internationally relevant today.