#99 - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, staring Spencer Tracey, Sidney Poitier, and Katherine Hepburn, was nominated for ten 1967 Academy Awards. It won Best Actress (Katherine Hepburn) and Best Original Screen Play, and rightly so. This movie exceeded expectations in every category: It was humorous, realistic, beautifully shot, with exceptional acting, and had a substantial plot that really addressed racial prejudice.

The story follows one pivotal day in the life of Joey Drayton (Katherine Houghton), an honest, genuine girl of 23, who has fallen in love with and become engaged to the internationally renowned African American physician John Prentice. All her life Joey was raised by her parents to believe that there is no difference between white folk and colored folk, and she took it to head, more then her parents had anticipated.

Her father, Matt Drayton (Spencer Tracy), was a liberal newspaper publisher, and a good man. Her Mother Cristina Drayton (Katherine Hepburn) was a glamorous art collector and distributor. On discovering their daughter’s intentions to marry a colored man, Cristina is Dumbfounded, but on seeing how incredibly happy her daughter is, she grows more and more happy for her. Joey’s father, on the other hand, is torn. He wants his daughter to be happily in love, and sees the intelligence and worth of her fiancé, but he also knows what terrible persecution they and their children will face, as well as having to fight the social beliefs he and his generation were raised on. The young doctor informs Joey’s father that he will only go through with marrying her if they receive his and his wife’s blessing, without any reservations. He is too good a man to be willing to split up such a close family as theirs because of his race, no matter how much he loves her.

This movie is an incredible social commentary that, on its release, forced America to wake up and admit that these racial prejudices were a problem that needed to be rectified. This was the first time a colored man and white girl ever kissed on screen, and the protests are embarrassing to recall. Because of this movie, a lot of positive changes were made for the African Americans; Before this film, and still some time after, it was illegal for there to be inter-racial marriages in certain states, but a few threw out this law because of the social awareness this film created.

I really enjoyed this film, not just because it had a purpose that it stuck to, but because you can see how passionate the director really was about the desegregation of society. The whole film was a very moving argument, with the two sets of parents of the couple asking every question in the book, and each time the questions were given the same perfect answer: Love will sustain you through any trial. If you have real love, it can take on the world, and all the ignorant people in it.