Guess Who's Coming...
...to dinner?**
Where: San Francisco, CA
Where exactly: The household of the Draytons (Matt and Christina)
When: This evening, at 6.30 pm.
Who: The Prentices (John Sr. and Mary)
Why: The Draytons' daughter Joanna and the Prentices' son Dr.John Wade are in love and plan to marry.
If life were really so simple and with such ease and without problems, there wouldn't have ever been the need for this 1967 classic.
There was just this one little problem. The Draytons were White*, the Prentices were Black*. And it was the roaring 60's, the height of the civil rights movement and race-riots.
Starring three Academy Award winners in Spencer Tracy as Matt Drayton, Katharine Hepburn (Tracy was her off-screen beau as well) as Christina Drayton and Sidney Poitier as John Wade Prentice, this movie does not even pretend against manipulating the viewers emotions. And goes the whole hog in getting the viewers to think about prejudices and bigotry and ignorance.
Dr. John Wade Prentice and Joanna Drayton met at some conference in Hawaii, and after a whirlwind romance, have fallen in love and want to marry. And they are flying down to San Francisco to meet Joanna's parents and seek their blessings. Only, he happens to be Black*, and she White*. And oh, her parents are said to the bastion of liberalism in San Francisco, her father Matt Drayton, as publisher of the newspaper Guardian, well respected in San Francisco.
What follows is the tale of this movie, how prejudices and ignorance puts the color of a person above the person itself. Even the Drayton's Black housekeeper is prejudiced against the doctor, at one point accusing him of being a fraud, saying "I dont care to see a member of my own race getting above himself".
This movie deliberately makes you examine your prejudices by eliminating any other reason to dislike John Wade Prentice. According to the notes on the inside-jacket of the DVD, the writers made the character of the doctor perfect, with the idea that if you were to disapprove it would be because of prejudice.
Contemporarily, this movie may lack the punch it definitely had back when it was released. And yet, this timeless classic serves as an excellent reminder of the follies of prejudice/hatred/bigotry. And to not let the "pigmentation problem" become an issue.
If you've not seen this yet, rent it and see it.
Personally, this movie is a favorite because of the pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, two of my fave actors in film. Poignantly enough, this happened to be Tracy's last film. He died just a couple weeks after completing this film.
* Deliberately avoided the PC terms of Caucasian and African-American.
**A big thanks to my pop for recommending this feature. Now I have the privilege of owning a copy of the DVD feature.
7 comments:
I will watch it. thanks for the review dude.
I shall watch it too. Needless to say, I will watch this one before the "Guess Who ?" version of the same.
Saranyan
No prob abt the review..its easy to do when the movie is a good one like this was.
Ranga
If you watch this before the "Guess Who" remake, I think you better avoid this newer (and crappy) remake.
I saw the heading and thought it is dinner with someone special.!!
What can I say....With 2 children..I watch more disney movies.!!! or some tamil movies.!!
This is a well-made movie. Surprisingly though, many reviews of "Guess Who?" managed to critique it as a poor remake of a not-so-good film.
Narayanan,
If it was a dinner with someone special, that is really not an event to blog about.
As for these classics, I am assuming you have either cable or satellite TV at home. And these b/w classics typically show up at or after the 10 pm hour on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Thats an avenue to catch up on the movies that you might otherwise miss.
Harish,
I am just going to say those critics are entitled to their own holy opinions. They must belong to the group of people who will always miss the forest for the trees.
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