Mr. Peck, After All These Years : After 50 years in the spotlight, America’s favorite good guy shares memories of his many successes--and a few failures

The New England mill owner whose factory and thus whose life’s work is under siege by the Wall Street marauder played by Danny DeVito in “Other People’s Money” is an All-American prototype.

He’s a standing symbol of an earlier, self-reliant time, stalwart, hickory hard but compassionate, the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments rolled into one. He is as out of place in the cutthroat world of modern high finance as Ralph Waldo Emerson would be at a disco.

You can think of a handful of film actors who would have been wonderful in this role, but they have left us for retirement (James Stewart, say) or for a higher stage (Henry Fonda)--all except Gregory Peck, who is indeed wonderful and who brings to the portrayal both the craft and the stature accumulated over a career that now stretches beyond half a century.

Peck, 75, knew the role was for him.

“I saw the play twice,” he said the other afternoon at his Bel-Air home, “and when I read that Norman Jewison had acquired it, I wrote him and said, ‘I’m the one for you.’ I really wanted to play that part.”

Peck’s stature and his identification with heroic roles (he was Douglas MacArthur, after all) are perfectly attuned to the cynical thrust of the script (by Alvin Sargent from the play by Jerry Sterner). The weight of an actor’s career, sometimes a disadvantage, is invaluable here.

Peck made his film reputation very quickly and in notably sensitive and compassionate roles. “The Keys to the Kingdom” (1944), in which he played a young priest and for which he won his first Oscar nomination, was only his second film. He is enshrined in motion picture history for “The Yearling” (1946) and, probably most memorably, for his embattled lawyer defending a black man in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), which earned him an Oscar.

But, as Peck is quick to point out, he has always sought to spell the good-guy image with some lively exceptions.

“Oh, I’ve played neurotics and a drunk or two and not least a sadistic Nazi doctor,” Peck said, referring to his role in “The Boys From Brazil” (1978). “To be thought of as Mr. Perfect is confining and monotonous--and the worst of it is that people can get fed up with you.

“I’ve done variations as often as I could, even now and then a comedy, which had usually been turned down by Cary Grant. For example, ‘Designing Woman’ (1957) was supposed to have been done by Cary and Grace Kelly, but for whatever reasons it wasn’t, and so Betty Bacall and I did it. I once told Cary I kept finding his thumbprints on all the comedies I was offered.”

Ruth Gordon once cautioned him that you never talk about your failures, on the grounds that you will only remind people of things they might well have forgotten. “But I’ve never minded talking about failures,” Peck said. Often it is because he retains a special affection for the failures.

He played the President of the United States in “Amazing Grace and Chuck” (1987), an anti-nuclear statement summed up by Leslie Halliwell in his Halliwell’s Film Guide as “expensive but inept propaganda.”

“The actor who wants to make a statement,” Peck said, “has to hope for a character who speaks for you. You can’t do that yourself without standing on a soapbox. The picture was a bit soft, but it made its statement. I liked it.”

Peck produced and was a major investor in “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” the filming of a play produced at the Mark Taper Forum. “We shot it in eight days for $325,000. The Vietnam War was still raging when we made ‘Catonsville,’ and it was a polemic against our position there.”

The major studios all turned it down, but Don Rugoff’s Cinema V in New York took it. It played five cities and died.

Peck noted wryly: “As Sam Goldwyn said, if people don’t come to the box office, you can’t stop them.”

In 1959, Peck co-produced and starred in “Pork Chop Hill,” another failure he remembers proudly as “an uncompromising vignette about war and the futility of it.” Peck as colonel leads his company on a suicidal attack against a Korean hilltop position. The company is decimated, but the attack succeeds. Then a message from HQ orders the force to withdraw; the hilltop isn’t needed after all.

“Milestone’s last images are of the men staggering single file down the hill and walking past the camera,” Peck said, referring to director Lewis Milestone. “People didn’t break down the doors to see it, but Time called it one of the year’s 10 best.

“And pictures have a kind of afterlife. When Harry Dean Stanton and I meet, we always speak of it. It was his film debut, as it was for George Peppard and Martin Landau and Robert Blake.”

“Old Gringo” was a role, as the satiric essayist Ambrose Bierce, that Peck loved, although the 1989 film was a disappointment both critically and commercially. “Often happens,” he noted philosophically, “that the parts are better than the whole, and you have to hope you’re one of the parts.”

Then again: “People remember us for our best work, thankfully. No one comes up and says, ‘I hated you in “I Walk the Line,” ’ even if they did hate you.”

In that 1970 film, Peck played a lawman who falls hopelessly in love with a moonshiner’s daughter. “Falls in love with her renewing youth,” he said. “He wrecked his career, his family, his reputation, all for this vain obsession, and he’s left with nothing.” The film did not do well, and it may be that in this instance Peck as Mr. Imperfect was too much so for audience tastes, just as John Wayne being shot in the back a third of the way into the film was too much for audience preferences in “The Cowboys.”

Peck, with a few days off during the shooting of “Other People’s Money,” flew to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to do a one-day cameo appearance in Martin Scorsese’s remake of the 1962 thriller “Cape Fear,” in which Peck played a lawyer whose wife is threatened by an ex-convict (Robert Mitchum) he had sent to prison.

“I didn’t want to do the cameo,” Peck said. “I don’t want to play little supporting parts. You can’t get your teeth in it. You’ve got to have some horses to ride, some meat on the bones, to make it fun to do. But Scorsese and (Robert) De Niro were persistent.”

In fact they tracked Peck to the Ritz in Paris, talked him into it and offered him a choice of cameos. “I took the one I thought was an amusing twist--the lawyer who defends De Niro instead of prosecuting him,” Peck said.

“I never thought of it as a great, memorable film,” he said of the original, “just a tight, suspenseful little melodrama, not really deserving of an homage. But Scorsese is the ultimate film buff. There’s nothing he doesn’t know, nothing he hasn’t seen.”

In “Other People’s Money,” which opened Friday, Peck has an uncommonly eloquent speech, trying to persuade the stockholders to vote for his slate of directors instead of DeVito’s. “I played a game with myself when I gave that speech, that I could really persuade everyone, all those extras we had, to vote for our slate,” Peck said.

“The French theater has a tradition of the tirade. The protagonist or the antagonist or both have to make a stirring speech. You always have to have a tirade ; it’s where you grab the ball and run for the touchdown.”

DeVito has his own tirade in the scene. “A wonderful fellow, a masterful actor and comedian,” Peck said of DeVito. “He puts his heart into everything.” Peck in particular admires a later scene in which DeVito is comedically but rather affectingly despondent over an unrequited love.

Director Jewison shot an ending to the film that was cut from the version being released--a kind of coda in which the factory is bustling again in changed circumstances. It did not substantially soften the sardonic message of the film, and Peck quite liked it.

“It’s a bit late to argue, I’m afraid,” Peck said, in chagrin rather than anger, “what with 1,400 or however many prints going out. But I do remember that David Selznick was editing ‘Gone With the Wind,’ even after it had opened at the Astor in New York.”

This is what Peck calls “my honors year.” In early December, he will be one of this year’s five recipients of the annual Kennedy Center Honors, and in February he will be the subject of a major retrospective and starry presentation at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. And, an honor as sweet as any, he has two more film assignments coming up.

It is a pleasing time for an actor whose Broadway debut, in Emlyn Williams’ “The Morning Star,” was 49 years ago.

“I was scared to death the first time I went out there,” Peck was remembering the other day. “The critics then--Wolcott Gibbs of the New Yorker, George Jean Nathan, Brooks Atkinson, Richard Watts Jr.--were called Murderer’s Row. There were seven daily papers in New York then. Boy, did I ever want to burrow through the cement in my dressing room and head for Mexico.

“I’d gotten out of Berkeley and done some summer theater and some road touring, so I suppose I was 25, maybe 26, a kid from La Jolla stepping out in the big city. In the dressing room I gave myself a kick and said, ‘ Get out there. ‘ That first act was an hour long, and I was in it the whole time. I was jittery for five minutes, and then I wasn’t jittery any more. You can die up there and say, ‘Call it all off, give ‘em their money back and let ‘em go home,’ or you can collect yourself and do it. The instinct for self-preservation takes over.”

(It was a lovely cast, including Gladys Cooper, Jill Esmond--Laurence Olivier’s first wife--Wendy Barrie and Rhys Williams, with Guthrie McClintic directing.)

Peck and his wife, Veronique, a French-born journalist, are apartment shopping in Paris, to extend the month a year they have been spending there. For several years they had a place overlooking the Mediterranean at Cap Ferrat in the south of France.

“I remember a quote from Scott Fitzgerald,” Peck said. “Americans buy villas in the south of France and keep them for 10 years. Somehow there’s quite a bit of truth in that. It’s still beautiful, and there’s the smell of the pines and the olive trees and the weather, but it can wear a bit thin.”

He feels detached from the Hollywood scene. “Truth to tell, some of our good friends are no longer here. Quite a few. People we really liked and were at ease with. Cary Grant, David Niven, Roz Russell, Jack Benny, Fred Astaire.

“I admire very many of the new filmmakers and the work they do, but I don’t know them. They have their own gatherings of people of their own generation. The agents who advise and counsel have taken over as the movers and shakers in the industry, and they too have their own social group. Birds of a feather.

“We still have a lot of friends here. But we’re not in the vortex anymore,” Peck said with a smile. “But that’s the natural order of things. We travel a lot. I don’t read the trade papers anymore, the little world of who’s doing what and what did what at the box office and what pictures are moving up to the front burner.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t have great enthusiasm for doing a thing like ‘Gringo.’ But if it doesn’t happen, we take a trip, and there are many other things in our lives. In an hour, I’m off to see my newest grandchild, Zachary Peck, the first for Veronique and me.”

The next morning he was off to Toronto with Jewison to promote “Other People’s Money,” the private and public lives still coexisting in a fine harmony.