Guess who's coming to dinner (1967)

I have mixed feelings about Guess who's coming to dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer). One the one hand, it treats its themes with too obvious techniques, leaning on a sudden "resolution" that is more rhetorics than insight. On the other hand, it is one of the few American films to treat bigotry in relation to race. A young girl, Joey, arrives at her partens' house with her boyfriend in tow. She presents him to her mother who is - shocked. We are of course invited a little bit to share the mother's shock, and this is a strange thing. The man is black, and a bit older than the girl. The mother soon overcomes her initial reaction, but this is not the case with her husband, who is overwhelmed by negative feelings about the whole thing. The interesting thing here is that the father does not have to vocalize exactly what it is that bothers him. He refers to "problems" and belittles his wife for being emotional. He is presented as the liberal for whom opinions are only a facade. When it comes to a real situation, they mean nothing. This character is perhaps the most interesting one in the film. In a very late scene, we witness a case of moral change. The father has a conversation with the boyfriend's mother. She has no problem with the marriage. She accuses the father of being insensitive, of having forgot what it is like to be in love. In his reactions, he has turned away from the demands of love (another interpretation that puts the film in bad light is that he has turned away from his virile masculinity). If this were not played out so one-dimensionally, it could have been a fine resolution. As it is now, we are confronted with too many stereotypes about what it is to be black and what it is to be white (along with many, many contrives storylines). The biggest problem with the film is perhaps how class is dealt with. We are sometimes led to believe that the boyfriend is accepted because he is respectable, a doctor, an educated man, and that this separates him from his blackness. The son say, in a conversation with his father, who is a retired mailman: "you consider youself as a black man. I see myself as a man." Somehow, this sort of line has a sinister backdrop; this guy is to such a great extent presented as "the perfect gentleman" who knows all the small society rules of middle class white folks. The score of the film doesn't help one in cheering for this film's humanism. The message of the sugary tune is that love is a compromise, taking a little, giving a little. -- Spencer Tracy as the ragged father of the girl is a pleasure to watch. So is Katherine Hepburn as the sophisticated liberal.