IMDb RATING
7.1/10
4.1K
YOUR RATING
An ex-soldier faces ethical questions as he tries to earn enough to support his wife and children well.An ex-soldier faces ethical questions as he tries to earn enough to support his wife and children well.An ex-soldier faces ethical questions as he tries to earn enough to support his wife and children well.
- Awards
- 1 win & 3 nominations
Tristram Coffin
- Byron Holgate
- (scenes deleted)
William 'Bill' Phillips
- Antonio Bulaga
- (scenes deleted)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaOne of Gregory Peck's movie children was played by Portland Mason, who was the daughter of actor James Mason, and an Italian delivery boy was played by Johnny Crawford a few years before he would achieve fame on the popular TV Western, The Rifleman (1958).
- GoofsThe opening shot of a New Haven Railroad train supposedly shows Tom's train home, leaving New York in the evening. However, the sunlight should be on its port side (as it is in the following interior shot).
- Quotes
Tom Rath: I don't know anything about public relations.
Bill Hawthorne: Who does? You've got a clean shirt and you bathe every day. That's all there is to it.
- Crazy creditsOnce it fades in, the 20th Century Fox logo (set to the film's dramatic opening credits music, rather than the traditional Fox fanfare) appears in a slightly smaller CinemaScope windowbox, slowly panning to normal size (correctly fitting the CinemaScope screen) before fadeout.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Fifties (1997)
- Soundtracks(I'm a) Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech
(1908) (uncredited)
Lyrics by Billy Walthall
Music by Frank Roman and Mike Greenblatt
based on "Son of a Gambolier"
Music by Charles Ives (1895)
Played on the ukulele by Gregory Peck
Featured review
Gritty and thoughtful melodrama
This film is based upon an original screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, famous for his scintillating screenplays for THE MUDLARK (1950), MY COUSIN RACHEL (1952), and THE THREE FACES OF EVE (1957). The story must have had a great deal of personal importance for him, because he chose to direct it (it was one of 8 films which he directed between 1954 and 1960). However, Johnson was not a great director, he was somewhat uninspired in that department and had few dynamic camera angles or sense of how to heighten drama visually, and in my opinion, he became too close to this story and material, so that he lost perspective to a certain extent. The film made a big hit when it came out, largely because Gregory Peck was the star. But the film addressed a number of pressing social and moral themes in a direct and sometimes brutal manner, which was unusual for the fifties. And some of them are timeless, such as Peck's despairing comment about his wartime exploits as a Captain of a Parachute division: 'I killed seventeen men. Not people in the distance, but men I could look at and see, including a young soldier whom I stabbed to death so that I could take his coat.' By addressing the issue of the traumas of the returned soldiers, haunting them still ten years after the end of the War, this film was very topical, and touched on the very themes which lay at the bottom of all the American film noir of the late forties and the fifties. Another reason for the interest in the film at the time was because of the unusual treatment of Peck being employed in the newly created television industry, a job you went to in Manhattan in a suit which was, often, grey flannel (hence the title). Jennifer Jones plays Peck's wife. Her role is surprisingly small, but most of it consists of her doing hysteria with tormented and streaming eyes, in the way she always did so well. Her husband Daryll Zanuck produced the film. There are good supporting roles for Lee J. Cobb, Keenan Wynn. Arthur O'Connell, Henry Daniell, and Gigi Perreau. (James Mason's daughter Portland Mason appears as Peck's daughter, but has little to do.) The Italian actress Marisa Pavan is excellent during a flashback section of the film as the sweet Italian girl with whom Peck has a love affair in Rome in 1945. She was the twin sister of the actress known as Pier Angeli (their real surname being Pierangeli). They both specialized in being the innocent Italian girl with the big trusting eyes who was capable of a great love, and there are some Italian girls who really look like that and really are like that, though less now than formerly. There is a third sister as well, Patrizia Pierangeli, 15 years younger than the twins, who appeared in eight films between 1972 and 1985. The other major role in the film is played with his usual dignity and thoughtfulness by Frederic March, as the rich head of a broadcasting corporation who hires Peck and whose arid and troubled private life is a major part of the story as well. (The major theme there is his sacrifice of a personal and family life in order to become a business moghul.) This film sprawls both in time and in space. Numerous major plot issues are walked away from at the end of the film and left entirely without any resolution. It is as if Johnson really needed a TV mini-series to get his complex stories told properly, and just had to cut it short. As it is, the film is a mammoth 2 hours and 33 minutes long. I would say that this was a well-meaning and deeply-felt project which partially failed, but its partial success is worthwhile. After all, films with a message are never that common at the best of times, and this was in the fifties era when so many issues were dodged by the social hypocrisies of the time. Congratulations, therefore, to Nunnally Johnson's ghost, for having tried very hard indeed to get serious about matters which were just not faced back then.
helpful•70
- robert-temple-1
- Feb 6, 2016
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Details
Box office
- Budget
- $2,670,000 (estimated)
- Runtime2 hours 33 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 2.55 : 1
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![Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones, and Fredric March in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMWQwN2MzOTUtZTI0Ni00NjRiLThiOTctYzZkM2QxYThlMjkyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjI4MjA5MzA@._V1_QL75_UX90_CR0,1,90,133_.jpg)
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By what name was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) officially released in India in English?
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