Now this is really sad. Gregory Peck died last night. I’ve had a crush on him for as long as I can remember. He was always the epitome of the quiet, dignified Gentleman. The quintessential “Hero”, and I loved him for it. Honorable even in circumstances that most men would have lost control in. And not even just in screen-life, that’s what really made him great. I think that also made his films all the more convincing – his inner integrity shown through in his films.
He was on the very top of my list of people I admire that I wanted to meet before they died. Why? Because I first fell in love with him in the movie ‘Roman Holiday’. If you haven’t seen it you really have to watch it to understand. There’s a moment in the film where a very heavily sedated Audrey Hepburn asks Gregory Peck to help her undress. Instead, he does the honorable thing – acknowledges she is not right in the head, removes her scarf, hands it to her and says, “Here, I think you can handle the rest.” He exits stage right, leaving her alone at precisely the right moment.
Next, I saw him as an even greater man in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Another top of another one of my lists: that is a film that I think *everyone* should see. It covers so much in only 129 minutes. It could not have been made without Gregory Peck. He said once of that film, ”I put everything I had into it – all my feelings and everything I’d learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children, and my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.” His performance as Atticus Finch is a wonderful role model for any father to follow. In fact, I think if more men behaved as he did, the world would be a far better place.
I still wish I could have met him, talked to him for a while. It’s also sad on another level. The Golden Age of Hollywood is dying off, that whole era is ending. With as much as we applaude scientific advances in film, I honestly don’t believe we’ve come close to the dignity portrayed in those films. Sure, not all of them were great works of art, but could we have honestly made ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ today? Or would we have added grotesque scenes of the rape and beating of Mayella Ewell, because that’s what we see as art? The meaning of that film was not lost because they never showed it. Instead, I think it was magnified. We don’t have to see something to know just how violent, how awful, something really is. Rather than show something that would offend, horrify, and scar the audience, we experience all those confused emotions experienced by Mayella when expressed through her outburst in the courtroom; one of the finest scenes in film history.
It’s sad to see all of these great actors and actresses go. I’m afraid of the day when Katharine Hepburn dies, and I hope somehow I can at least meet her, since I’ve lost that chance with Gregory Peck.