Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we’re looking at a documentary about Gregory Peck for what would have been his centennial birthday.
“It takes ten pictures to make a star”, says the subject of A Conversation with Gregory Peck quoting Carole Lombard. It’s a statement worth reiterating today for any number of reasons, not least of all because there are few actors these days who epitomise the word ‘star’ better than Peck. It happens several times throughout this 1999 documentary where people refer to the Oscar-winning actor as a shining example of humanity and a beacon for what people ought to strive for. He was, and still is, a star.
This career overview and remembrance by Barbara Kopple offers Peck the same sort of dignity and respect that the director has afforded all of her subjects throughout her career including striking coal miners, meatpackers, and the Dixie Chicks. Much like Becoming Mike Nichols, which we looked at last week, A Conversation with Gregory Peck centers around a collection of talks the actor gave to audiences across America in Boston, Buffalo, Virginia and more. Peck would sit on stage and offer stories and anecdotes while dutifully answering audience questions and requests for autographs (he’s even more of a consummate professional to do entire Q&As without a moderator – those are tough). They act as a comforting storytelling device, the grandfather in the armchair telling stories of how he met his second wife, a journalist, after she ditched an interview with Albert Schweitzer to meet him for lunch in Paris, how he gave up thoughts of a career as a priest, and how the climactic gag of Roman Holiday’s mouth of truth scene was improvised.
These conversations only make up a small portion of the film, with the rest dedicated to following Peck and his family on holidays, to events, and through the pregnancy of his daughter, Cecelia (who would go on to co-direct Shut Up & Sing with Kopple seven years later). We see Peck receive his Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton, have dinner with French President Jacques Chirac, discuss the naming of his grandchild as Harper (after Harper Lee, of course, who is referenced so often throughout that she’s almost an invisible secondary subject of the movie), and more. My favourite moment was when watching football with his family a commercial for Armageddon plays and conversation turns to Deep Impact, which unbeknownst to Gregory starred his former Mockingbird co-star Robert Duvall: “Was that another giant meteor movie?”
Duvall is actually the first person we hear spoken of as within seconds of walking on stage Peck’s typical generosity is seen as he praises Duvall. We later get to meet Mary Badham, too. Still, for all the talk of To Kill a Mockingbird, fans of Peck’s work will likely relish smaller anecdotes about The Keys of the Kingdom, Duel in the Sun, Moby Dick, The Guns of Navarone, The Boys from Brazil, and more. Nothing from The Omen, mind you, but he is open about having made his fair share of bad films. I was particularly interested in his social activism, from his acting in films with themes of race (Mockingbird) and antisemitism (Gentleman’s Agreement), his producing of anti-war The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, and his outspoken attitudes towards gun control. Most of which are sadly given no more time than revisiting the pool in Paris where his wife learned to swim or to the picking of figs from an orchard on a country estate. And, please, who could watch this movie and not want more scenes of Peck and Lauren Bacall gasbagging in a lush Manhattan apartment?
In the closing passages, Peck notes that he hopes his legacy as an actor is that audiences walked out of the theatre knowing their time was well spent. Whatever A Conversation’s limitations – it was initially made for PBS's American Masters after all before taking on a life of its own and even screening at Cannes – it felt like time well spent with a talented actor and a fine human being. And sometimes that’s all that matters.
A Conversation with Gregory Peck will air on TCM tonight, and can also be viewed on YouTube or on certain editions of the To Kill a Mockingbird DVD.