Anyone who already owns the October 1999 DVD release of Gentleman's Agreement and is thinking of getting Fox's January 2003 "Studio Classics" version can probably save their money. Talk about missed opportunities -- the reissue of Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement comes loaded with special features that aren't all that special and are (with one important exception) a disappointment. The most prominent of these is the audio commentary track by actresses June Havoc and Celeste Holm, and film critic and author Richard Schickel. Would that it delivered half of the promise that one might reasonably have anticipated, one would feel well served, but the commentary track is an exercise in futility. One heartily wishes that Havoc's and especially Holm's commentaries could have been recorded a decade earlier; the women sound very frail, and their observations, sparsely scattered throughout the length of the film, are blunted by age and the sheer distance in time from their work. A few odd comments about Kazan or some aspect of the movie's production don't really comprise a significant contribution, but it might be the best that either actress is capable of at this late date. Holm, in particular, sounds as though she's just a step or two from the grave. Schickel has written some excellent books but his commentary here seems flaccid and poorly focused. He is content to bounce around his own head, holding debates with himself as he considers the authenticity or verisimilitude of a scene or a performance -- we're expected to follow along contentedly, which is a serious chore for several technical and stylistic reasons, involving us in more effort than Schickel seems to have made in preparing his talk. Most annoyingly, he hasn't done the simple leg work to pin down the basic hard facts of the production and its history. Though a professed scholar, his remarks are filled with lots of "maybe's" and uses of "perhaps" in his observations of action on the screen, and places where he "has a feeling" about why something is or isn't in the script, all of which makes one wonder precisely why Schickel is on this track to begin with -- ten minutes into his commentary, the only non-wishy-washy parts of his commentary are when he is telling us what we're already seeing on the screen. He loves to tell us that a scene he likes is "nice" and enjoys explaining what we're seeing, but he doesn't seem able to focus on the movie within the context of Kazan's work, or the cinematic milieu of the period. He also reveals himself in the opening minutes as incapable of distinguishing the real New York from sets and back lots. The movie retains its punch more than 50 years later, but from Schickel's commentary one would never know why. He also has a tendency at times to swallow his words. Twenty-five minutes in, one tires of his observations that "I like that" or some other remark that tells us nothing about the movie. The missed opportunity on the narrative track is hardly compensated for by the presence of excerpts from a pair of Fox-Movietone newsreels relating to the film, though the American Movie Classics' Backstory installment about the movie makes for fascinating viewing. The trailer included here is actually from the post-Oscar reissue of the movie, and one would like to have seen the trailer from the original release to compare them -- as it is, it's fascinating to see the prominent placement of a string of soon-to-be-blacklisted actors featured prominently and proudly. The movie itself looks about as good as it ever has or will, short of a good high-definition transfer, and the sound is mastered cleanly at a slightly low volume. The disc opens on an easy-to-use menu that functions on three layers, all well-delineated. The 2003 edition utilizes the same 13 chapters that were designated on the old edition.