Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? The film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" presents a critically acclaimed story about a Caucasian woman brining home -- unannounced -- an African-American man she has fallen in love with. But that is just the main storyline; what this film embraces is the culture in the 1960s, freshly steeped in the post-Civil Rights movement. That culture was struggling to become integrated but there was still a racially-based code of conduct that included the subordination of African-Americans.

This paper reviews the issue of interracial relationships that are an integral part of the movie, and alludes to the dreams and expectations the characters shared as well as how those dreams turned out. Question One: Discuss how the film was about interracial relationships. Some viewers perhaps saw the film as something other than the tensions resulting from an interracial relationship being thrust on a wealthy, liberal Caucasian family.

The easier thing for viewers to do was to link the dramatic confrontations that occurred in the family and the dialogue to post-Civil Rights tensions, to blacks still trying to get respect and rights. But this was most certainly not just about liberals, or white wealth in the 1960s, or how a black man could become a doctor could land an international job, nor is it necessarily about hypocrisy (liberals traditionally support the rights of people of color, except perhaps when a black family moves in next door).

As Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn explains in the Journal of Social History, the film explores the "human and tension inherent in the confrontation" of the parents who struggle with "their own hypocritical reservations about the prospect of their precious only daughter marrying a black man (Lasch-Quinn, 1999, p. 410). The film in a way is lodged in between what Lasch-Quinn calls "the old racial etiquette of segregation" and the demands society has created following the demise of Jim Crow and legal integration ushered in by the Civil Rights Movement (Lasch-Quinn, 410).

The etiquette issue is more than just a white father contemplating giving his consent to a black man to marry the white father's daughter. The etiquette in this film is also about two fathers both of whom are being verbally attacked for their reluctance to bless the proposed marriage. The race question almost becomes a subplot when Poitier's character lectures his own father, and Poitier's mother lectures the white father about what it means to be in love.

The black cook Matilda lectures Poitier's character for being out of line by trying to marry a white woman. All these individual clashes result from the original tension of a proposed interracial marriage, which makes the film more interesting than just a black and white, one-theme story. It is interesting to note that at the time this film was in theaters, there were 17 southern states had had laws against interracial marriage (Lecture Notes).

Question Two: Relate to the dreams the characters had about how American society could be improved and compare those elements to what actually has happened. First of all it should be mentioned that the characters wanting to be married but also were wanting the approval of their parents. They knew it would be difficult to get their parents to agree, but they are optimists in their views of the future so it was a matter of putting in the time and effort to get that approval.

Levine's writings are either borderline cynical, cryptic, or just so blatantly honest that the appear to be negative towards the film, and actors, and the entire discussion of interracial and integration dynamics.

While the characters are doing battle with parents over old core cultural values that have gone by the wayside -- and yet the characters have a burning desire to be left to their own devices, e.g., marriage and a long life together -- Levine writes that "Drayton's revised narrative" shows that "the film does not really want to be about any kind of racial conflict, but instead, about the irrelevance of racial differences" (Levine, 2001, 374).

It is "essential," Levine continues on page 375, to the "integrationist premise" of the film that "whiteness itself not be rendered explicitly desirable." In fact Levine points out on page 375 that the black assistant to Tillie, Dorothy, has "short hair, short skirt, and long legs," which Levine insists is far more typical of a female in the 1960s than Joanna, who dresses more like a woman in the 1950s.

This is Levine's way of critiquing this movie is to apply judgments on the director's choice of language, on what the characters say in terms of what was the politically correct thing to do in the 1960s, and exact harsh judgments on Hollywood. In fact the last words Spencer Tracy utters in the film are said by Levine to represent his last words as a superstar actor.

I'm not sure how that adds to an understanding of the film's principal theme -- interracial relationships and marriage -- but Levine is spot on when she says that "…the film preserves the primacy of the white male subject position… [and that] only black men are real political threats" (376). Levine appears obsessed with white women and how they allegedly help drive a wedge between white men and black men. Moreover, Levine suggests that when Tracey refutes Mrs.

Prentice's accusations that he is "too old to remember love or sex," the audience relates more to Tracy and Hepburn as a real-life couple than to the movie's characters themselves. This is.