Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Joanna comes home from Hawaii engaged. Her fiancé John Prentice is a successful doctor and he is Black. Her parents, who consider themselves liberal, have to give their blessing before he leaves for a World Health Organization post in Geneva. Stanley Kramer directed. Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier star. The timing was not incidental. Six months before release, interracial marriage was still illegal in seventeen states; the Supreme Court struck those laws down in Loving v. Virginia on 12 June 1967. Tracy's participation was a problem in itself. He was sixty-seven with several serious conditions, and when insurers refused to cover him, Kramer and Hepburn put their own salaries in escrow. His scenes were finished just seventeen days before he died in June 1967. Hepburn won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it. She said she never saw the finished film, that it would be too painful. She and Tracy had been together for years. On a 4 million dollar budget it grossed 56.7 million and broke the assumption that Southern audiences would not turn out for films with Black leads. Critics praised the performances. In later years some argued the film patronised the subject rather than confronting it: the groom is made so faultless that the audience is left nothing to object to. Who it is for: viewers interested in sixties American cinema and the politics of the period. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an edge. The film resolves its conflict from the easy side, and that criticism holds.