Peck’s virtues available on video

The first time I saw Gregory Peck in a movie, the country was celebrating its bicentennial, Apple had just introduced its first computer, Viking was en route to Mars, and Peck, at 60, was en route to enjoying a solid box office comeback in Richard Donner’s horror film, “The Omen.”

It was 1976.

I was 10 at the time and the film, bolstered by the success of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist,” was a huge box office hit, setting records and generating the sort of buzz no movie-loving kid could ignore.

Determined to see it, a friend and I sneaked into the movie, which featured Peck as Robert Thorn, a U.S. diplomat faced with the mounting evidence that his son, Damien (Harvey Stephens), wasn’t the little bundle of joy he assumed he was, but was, in fact, the antichrist.

It was an afternoon filled with decapitations, Lee Remick’s spectacular fall from the balustrade, Damien’s ugly undoing – and it was perfect, memorable to this day.

Back then, I was too young to appreciate what Peck brought to “The Omen,” but in the years since – and after a weekend spent viewing that movie and a handful of his other films in the wake of his death at 87 last Thursday -what’s clear is how much that movie, and so many of his other films, benefited from his presence.

Not unlike Jason Miller’s performance in “The Exorcist,” what Peck brought to “The Omen” was its conflicted moral center, as well as a gravitas and an urgency that deepened what might have been – without him in it – a solid, yet sensationalistic horror flick about satanic possession.

From the start of his film career, which spanned 54 years and included more than 50 films, Peck held the world’s interest with the grace of his conviction, his charisma, his good looks and the measured, instantly recognizable timber of his voice, which could be like a balm.

After a stint on Broadway, his first five years in films found the actor earning four Academy Award nominations, first as Father Francis Chisholm in “The Keys of the Kingdom” (1944), and then as Penny Baxter in “The Yearling” (1946), Phil Green in “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947), and Frank Savage in “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949).

His career high came in 1962, when he starred in three films, including his best, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor for his unforgettable portrayal of Atticus Finch, a liberal white lawyer fighting the injustices of prejudice in a 1932 Alabama courtroom. Our own country was on the eve of fighting those very issues on the world stage. 1962 also saw Peck in “Cape Fear,” in which he played a small-town lawyer fighting a different sort of evil – the ex-con (Robert Mitchum) trying to destroy him and his family – and in the epic “How the West Was Won,” which took no fewer than three directors – Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford – to muscle onto the screen.

But neither proved as important as “Mockingbird.” Directed by Robert Mulligan from Harper Lee’s novel, the film did for Peck what “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” did for James Stewart. It blurred the line between performer and performance, confirming the decency audiences always suspected, or at least hoped, was at Peck’s core while also setting the tone for the rest of his career.

Indeed, after playing Finch, Peck would be forever linked to the man in ways that Stewart would be forever linked to Smith and to his character, George Bailey, from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It’s the sort of blurring that turns a star into an icon and generates enormous good will, so much so that the American Film Institute, an organization Peck once headed, recently chose Finch as cinema’s top screen hero, an honor that came just days before Peck’s death.

For Peck, versatility was key. He rode the whale in “Moby Dick,” charmed Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday,” kept audiences on edge in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” and made them uneasy in “The Boys From Brazil.”

In the ’50s and ’60s, he was a top box office draw, but unlike most of today’s leading men, so many of whom seem so small and generic in comparison, Peck took risks that didn’t appear to hinge on the size of the paycheck. His films weren’t always successful, but at least you never sensed that he was selling out, even with “The Omen.” That virtue is lost in today’s Hollywood, but it can be rediscovered at the video store in the films of Gregory Peck.

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.