MovieChat Forums > Gentleman's Agreement Discussion > Two Lines

Two Lines

posted 16 years ago by nicoledesapio
4 replies | jump to latest

One is irritating, and the other is funny.

First, the irritating one. Is anyone else annoyed when after the grandmother's heart incident Phil says to his son, "If she's careful she might be fine until you're grown up and married and have kids"? The assumption that OF COURSE Tommy WILL marry and have children really irritates me.

Second, I always laugh when Kathy and Phil are in Kathy's apartment after Anne's party, disussing Phil's assignment. Kathy wants to tell her sister that Phil isn't really Jewish. After all, she reasons, "your mother knows." And Phil answers, "Yes dear, she had to."

Yeah, well, naturally Phil's MOTHER doesn't think her son is Jewish!

Edited to add: Three lines, actually. There's a bit of dialogue near the start of the film that I think is both funny and telling. Phil is struggling to explain to Tommy what Jews are, specifically how someone can be a Jew AND an American. He talks about the fact that there are different countries:

Phil: The language is different and the food is different and the flag is different --
Tommy: And the airplanes are marked different...
Phil: Differently, yes.

Being a writer, Phil is fine at correcting his son's grammar; explaining to him all the implications of being Jewish is a much more difficult task!

[–] krasnegar 16 years ago

An important thing to remember is that, stricty speaking, even if your father *is* Jewish, if your mother *isn't*, you're not.

[–] FrizzKWest 16 years ago

As for your first quote, I don't think you can really blame someone for living in their time period. That was the norm. It was very unusual for a man to not have a wife and children.

Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about it - Oscar Wilde

[–] RRozsa 10 years ago

That is correct, krasnegar. My husband, born in 1944 in Transylvania (Nagyvarad, Hungary then, Oradea, Romania now), to a mother who was a Russian Jew, and a father who was a Hungarian Catholic. My husband told me that the Jewish religion considers the child to be the religion of the mother, so the Jews have always considered my husband to be Jewish. Christians, however, tended at that time to use the father's religion to determine the child's religion, so Christians considered him to be Catholic.

Life's a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!

[–] gribfritz2 11 years ago

They should have left the line as it was originally written. "If she's careful she might be fine until you're grown up and leaping through time with Scott Bakula."