Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a nominee for Best Picture of 1967, must have seemed old-fashioned even when it was initially released. In the midst of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, it must have been rather quaint to watch a white, middle-aged (to be charitable), liberal couple come to terms with the fact that their daughter is going to marry a black man. This film is perhaps best known now as being the final collaboration between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, as well as being Tracy's last film before he died. Given those two factors, I can understand why the Academy chose to include this film among its top five choices for that pivotal year of 1967, but watching it nowadays, one is struck by how much it truly caters to the white audience.

Tracy and Hepburn play Matt and Christina Drayton, a successful couple living in San Francisco who have taught their daughter Joey/Joanna (Katharine Houghton, Hepburn's niece in real life) to treat everyone equally. And that's just what she does. During a vacation in Hawaii, she meets and falls in love with Dr. John Wade Prentice (Sidney Poitier), and they come to visit the Draytons to seek their blessing. Hepburn's Christina is on board almost immediately, of course, but Matt needs more time. Joey, however, gives him one day to make up his mind because Dr. Prentice is leaving for New York and then Switzerland for his work.

All of the action of the film takes place in just one day, and much of it occurs in the Drayton home. There is one scene where Matt and Christina go for ice cream just to get a break from thinking about Joey and her fiance. That sequence is designed to show just how out of touch Tracy's Matt is. He can't even remember which flavor of ice cream he likes. That he comes to enjoy the flavor he's brought is supposed to be a revelatory moment, I suppose, but you don't really need that heavy-handed of a metaphor to get the point.

Dr. Prentice's parents (played by Roy E. Glenn Sr. and the lovely Beah Richards) come up to San Francisco from Los Angeles once they hear of the engagement. Mr. Prentice and Matt have a serious talk about their objections to the marriage. Mrs. Prentice and Christina have a talk about their support for the marriage. Mr. Prentice talks with his son. John talks with Matt. This is a very chatty movie overall. Much of the talk is, of course, about what kinds of obstacles the couple will face after they are married. If their parents are any indication, they're in for a lot of contradictory reactions.

Of course, the big scene, the one everyone both in the movie and in the audience is waiting for, is the one in which Matt reveals how he feels about the engagement. I know that it is meant to be the key moment of the film, but having a older white man determine whether or not his daughter and her fiance should get married smacks of a continuation of the existing power structure. Yes, I know that's what the speech is all about, but really, it's still delivered by an old white man. The future bride and groom are supporting players here, as are all of the African Americans. Poitier, even though he's the co-star, defers to Tracy's Matt, and the Prentices are only on screen for a brief period of time. Ironically, the most vocal African American in the film is Tillie, the servant (!) played by the great Isabel Sanford, and she makes some of the most racist comments in the movie, even using the N-word to describe Poitier's accomplished doctor and repeatedly calling him "boy." How this film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay--over Bonnie and Clyde, no less, and Two for the Road--remains a mystery to me.

By the way, if you ever question the depth of love the Academy had/has for Katharine Hepburn, just realize that she won Best Actress for this role, yet she has so very little to do in the movie except to listen. I suppose she gets to be teary-eyed at the end while Tracy, her long-time lover, delivers a speech about how happy they have been together, but she was up against such strong performances as Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. Hepburn would win again the next year for a far stronger performance in The Lion in Winter, but you have to be puzzled over how she was chosen from the roster for 1967.

Despite the pleasure of watching Tracy and Hepburn together for the final time, I can't really say that I enjoyed this movie. It takes far too patronizing an attitude toward the black characters, and they are all so willing to allow for the white man to have the final say. I know that the movie makes Poitier's doctor too good to be true so that the only questions will be what kind of life he will have with Joey or whether they have decided too quickly to be married. Yet even taking that step makes the filmmakers so overly cautious, unwilling or unable to allow the audience to think in a more complex way about race relations. Ultimately, I think this movie fails in its attempts to bridge whatever gaps between the races it was attempting to bridge, and I think it probably wasn't that successful even in 1967.