Pride and Prejudice
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, we are proud to have a trio of films exploring prejudice. We’ll have a wine pairing for each of these movies, too.
In the 1947 film, Gentleman’s Agreement, bigotry against Jews was the topic. There is also a splash of female discrimination thrown in, to cast the net even wider. Gregory Peck plays a reporter who masquerades as a Jew in order to write an article about antisemitism. To his shock and dismay, he finds that the hatred of Jews is alive and well.
The prejudice examined by Peck’s character extends beyond admonishments against seeing a Jewish doctor, and barring Jews from employment and housing opportunities, to community-wide ostracization. The rock he looks under is teeming with society’s worms.
Darryl F. Zanuck wanted to make the picture after being rejected for a country club membership, even though he wasn’t Jewish. Other movie moguls asked him to reconsider, fearing the movie would cause unwanted trouble. It was even feared that a divorced female character would offend the so-called Legion of Decency. What times, eh? Elia Kazan won an Oscar for his direction and was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee as a reward for his association with the film.
Herzog Wine Cellars produces a variety of kosher wines in, of all places, Oxnard. The grapes come from other areas more suitable to vineyards. The story of the company’s formation begs us to wonder what sort of wrath those grapes endured in the forties and fifties.
http://www.nowandzin.com/2022/10/kosher-cab-from-oxnard-via-paso.html
In The Heat of the Night came out in 1967, in the wake of a handful of major race riots. Sidney Poitier’s inspired performance in that heated environment served as a touchstone for black Americans of that day.
Poitier plays police detective Virgil Tibbs, and he plays the hell out of the role. However, it was co-star Rod Steiger who grabbed the Best Actor Oscar that year. Not to take anything away from Mr. Steiger, but why couldn’t a black man win a Best Actor statue twice in the same decade? Talk about prejudice. Tibbs, a Philadelphia cop, stands his ground in Mississippi as Poitier grinds out the catchphrase of his career, “They call me Mister Tibbs!” Heat, indeed.
We bear no Eurocentric biases here, especially against Portugal. The Old Cortinha Prejudice Red no doubt has a boatload of Portuguese grapes, so count me in. At $23, make it two bottles.
The title of White Dog may sound like a metaphor, and maybe it is. But the 1982 Samuel Fuller film concerns a dog trained by a racist to attack black people. A black man takes in the dog and begins to retrain him to a color-blind state. Can racial prejudice be cured, or is it an ingrained trait? The ending of the movie offers no firm answer to that question
White Dog Pinot Grigio may not offer an answer to the question of whether friends should let friends drink Pinot Grigio. It does, however, offer an $11 opportunity to gulp white wine from an unnamed part of California while ruminating on the movie’s finer points. There is a Pennsylvania wine out there called White Dog Red, but what sense does that make?
Gentleman’s Agreement was actually kind of corny. It was a sad irony that Elia Kazan made a denunciation of bigotry but then named names to HUAC (and co-star John Garfield saw his career ruined because of the blacklist).