The American as Noble Man 高尚的美国人
When he died Gregory Peck took movie idealism with him
格利高里·派克逝世了，也带走了电影的理想主义
译者点评：一个人，过着多个人的生活；分享多个人的身份；在演艺生涯中扮演了不知多少个角色；而谢世后，留下的却只有一个逝去的时代。多事者问：何谓不朽？答曰：灵魂。多事者再问：何谓灵魂？再答曰：对理念的真知，因为理念是永恒的。那么，一如先哲所说的不变的永恒，对于曾经代表了一个时代的派克，他的理念显然是用来换取自由的力量和同情。而正因为他去了，他所代表的力量和同情才成了人们传诵的人之魂。
The movie studio wanted Rock Hudson to play Atticus Finch. Fate decreed otherwise. Gregory Peck got the role of the smalltown Southern lawyer in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. The hero of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel had been a man much like her father and when the author met the actor on the first day of shooting she noted “Gregory you’ve got a little potbelly just like my daddy.” The star replied “Harper that’s great acting.”
Actually it was great inhabiting. “You never really understand a person...” Atticus says “until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Tolerance ripening into empathy that was Peck’s gift in playing an elevated species of American the man of strength and compassion. Today that species is more than endangered it has nearly vanished. But it flourished for most of the actor’s halfcentury onscreen when Americans prided themselves on their fellow feeling for the downtrodden and their ability to uplift the races. Peck was liberal when liberal was cool.
From his early days as the most gorgeous man in pictures in Spellbound and Duel in the Sun to his long prime with a Mount Rushmore visage and the voice of Yahweh on a good day Peck was the sonorous pitchman for movie humanism. He showed how a strong man could also be a gentle man. He counseled ethnic tolerance of Jews in Gentleman’s Agreement and blacks in Mockingbird. As a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids Peck made rectitude appear robust. That sanctity had staying power this month the American Film Institute chose Atticus Finch as the top hero in U.S. movie history.
Peck wasn’t just an icon. He was an actor a smart one. He picked hit properties in a wide variety of genres romantic comedy Roman Holiday action The Guns of Nararone horror The Omen. He was bold in taking roles—Ahab General MacArthur—that twisted his nobleman image. He assayed his share of misanthropes including Nazi monster Josef Mengele and western hombres as craggy as a butte. But Peck will be best remembered as the movies’ exemplary father figure who often and surprisingly revealed the pacifism at the heart of heroism.
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