Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

In our day to day lives, we’re occasionally confronted with ideological or cultural differences which surprise or even infuriate us. These differences seem more exasperating when it involves something as simple and beautiful as one individual’s expression of love for another. For example, if you raise the topic of same sex or arranged marriages in a group, you’re likely to stir a hornet’s nest of feelings regardless of who you’re talking to. Some things never seem to change. Forty plus years ago interracial marriage would have stirred an even bigger nest of raw feelings, which is what the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner set out to do. This academy award winning movie clearly and bluntly exposes the race prejudice, ignorance and social stigma that inter racial families must deal with in their daily lives.

Academy award winners Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn portray the successful and sophisticated Drayton family who live in San Francisco’s North Beach or Pacific Heights neighborhood. He is the publisher of a liberal daily newspaper and she is the savvy owner of an art gallery. They’re shocked when their twenty three year old daughter, Joanna, returns unexpectedly from a vacation to present her ten day old fiancé, Dr. John Wade Preston: respected Professor of tropical diseases at John’s Hopkins University who is himself en route to a post with the UN WHO in Geneva. Their reaction doesn’t come from the doctor’s credentials or his ten year seniority to Joanna; they’re shocked because he’s black. Academy award winner Sidney Poitier plays the impeccable Dr. Preston whose integrity and charm disarms any self respecting person of objections.

Screenwriter William Rose, who won the academy award for this picture, sets the story so the audience is confronted exclusively with the realities of racist and social stigma. Portraying Dr. Prentice as a model person with a “pigmentation problem” ensures that the parents and the audience must address their own misgivings of a black man marrying a white woman. The perspectives presented in the film are from various viewpoints. We see that a mother’s love of their children and hope for their happiness is universal and so is the father’s fear and uncertainty for their future. We see unfounded suspicion from long time employees of the Draytons (one black, another white) and the unconditional understanding of the teens of the new generation. A scene at the drive in ice cream shop serves to show the possible joy gained from adventure when Mr. Drayton tries a new flavor ice cream. The contentment of his discovery is dashed when his car gets in a fender bender with one of the twelve percent of blacks that live in San Francisco. The metaphor is clear: new discoveries and unions can be joyful, but can easily be dashed in the real world.

The movie’s release in 1967 in the midst of the Civil Rights movement and on the heels of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech highlights the challenges our country faced to achieve racial equality and acceptance. Dr. Preston’s retired father punctuates this when he remarks that the planned marriage of their children is still illegal in nearly a dozen states. What’s disappointing is that nearly a generation later, interracial marriages, not just among black and white, are still subject to irrational prejudice. It s also a small wonder that people object to marriage among loving adults because of their same sex, yet in other cases condone marriage among virtual strangers because of the tradition of arrangement. However in the end, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner gives us reason to hope that love and its infectious optimism cures us of our fear and ignorance so we can all take a little joy in these new adventures.