GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER POITIER,HEPBURN REVIEW

Look at what Kramer made, before he put GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER on the screen: ON THE BEACH (1959 about nuclear war); INHERIT THE WIND (1960 about religion versus the Darwinian theory of evolution in Tennessee); JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG (1961, raising question about world culpability in the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis). There are no flies on Kramer.

I recall the stir created by GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER when it first came out in 1967. Americans were being tested and challenged, to say the least, by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. At one end, white liberals were risking their lives in the south along side African-American civil rights activists. At the other end, racist bigots north and south were calling activists of any color communists, and much worse. Sometimes, in the heat of the summer with racial tensions and frustrations rising, some cities were torched. Into this cauldron Kramer dropped GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER. I can still recall white liberals and radicals condemning Sydney Poitier's character with slurs such as "super spade" because Kramer seemd he felt obliged to create an African-American male hero who could walk on water. In Kramer's world, an American black man had to be superman merely to qualify for marrying a middle class attractive, white air head. The bigots condemned the film because .... well, that's what bigots do.

I believe that Kramer did what he thought was necessary for telling the story of an interracial marriage in1960s America. And, as a matter of fact, when all is said and done he may have hit the nail on the head. He showed what kind of fantastic credentials an African-American male needed for even the most super liberal white father to accept him as a son-in-law for his carefully cultivated, racially oblivious daughter. So then, while today's racially enlightened viewer may be offended by such directorial excesses, Kramer's point was, I think, that this is how bad things are in America. A white super liberal has a lot of trouble with his daughter marrying an African-American superman. If that was what Kramer was up to with this film, then his point was well taken!

For the many Tracy-Hepburn reasons others mentioned here, a lot of pathos was added to the film. My complaint is somewhat trivial .... but it has some merit, I think. The occasional crude and rude manner in which the character played by Tracy expresses himself to his daughter and wife seemed out of character. He was supposed to be a gruff two-fisted, newspaperman. But when near the end of the movie he barks at his daughter to "shut up" and later asks Tillie their maid, "when the hell are we eating?" this was out of character. It was poor directing rather than poor acting. Of course, Tracy was literally only a few days from actually dying of cancer. And so one can jump to the conclusion that Tracy's medical condition caused the lapses. But after Tracy's absolutely superb soliloquey in the last minutes of GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, Kramer owed it to Tracy to make his excit scene both in the film and in life perfect. Tracy could have done it with Kramer's help. Because Kramer allowed his film to be made less than perfectly, I couldn't give it a perfect 5-star rating.

Otherwise, Kramer succeeded in getting an important social message across while at the same time entertaining. This makes GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER an excellent, if occasionally flawed, work of art.