No, don't actually guess. It's the movie we watched over the weekend. Staring Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, it's a movie about a white girl (played by Katharine Houghton) who brings her fiancee to meet her parents (Hepburn and Tracy). And it turns out he's black. This we knew going into the movie, but we were surprised at every turn by the way things were set up. We had to keep pausing the movie so we could react as we slowly find out that the fiancee (Poiter) is a doctor, 37 (she's only 23), widowed, associate director of the World Health Organization, and they've only know each other for 10 days, and they're planning on going to Geneva (Switzerland) to get married in 2 or 3 weeks. Wow! Instead of being a comedy, fitting in all sorts of little racial jokes everywhere, it's more of a drama with the obvious social commentary built in. It was filled in 1967, so you also get to hear the terms "colored," "negro," and even one N-bomb.It's really quite a good film, and all the actors are excellent, and I particularly liked Tracy. It turns out that he was so sick during the filming, they were preparing the movie to be made both with and without him. He died 17 days after filming was complete, . Poitier, Hepburn and Tracy are all Oscar winners, and Hepburn's daughter in the film is her niece in real life.
6 comments:
I just read 'The Measure of a Man' by Sidney Poitier. It made me want to see all the films he's in, and your review makes me want to see this one even more. He would only play characters which he believed measured up to his standards. It was a good book (disclaimer: there were several f-bombs).
What I really want to hear is the opinions of those who were around to see the film when it originally came out. It's interesting to me how far we've come as far as racial issues are concerned in our parents' lifetimes.
I want to read Measure of a Man! It's actually on my list of things to get at the library. Good to know about the F-bombs though. That kind of surprises me. I am intrigued by the movie now too. I love Spencer Tracy!
Now you'll have to rent the new version and see how it compares.
We've seen the new one, and they're really quite different. The new one is a comedy through and through (just look at the cast). Really, as I think about it, the movies don't share a lot other than the basic premise: bringing home a boy who is an unexpected color. The new one focuses more on the guy trying to make the dad accept him, while the old one is more about the adults (all 4 parents) deciding how they feel about the choice their kids are making.
The fact that this movie was made at all in 1967 is somewhat amazing. Casting was critical. Poitier was just coming off the hit movie, To Sir With Love. Thus he was not just any black man but a black man who had helped nuns (Lilies of the Field) and turned around troubled working class teens in London. Had he not looked and talked like a dark white man Guess Who's Coming to Dinner might not have flown. It also helped to have the Tracy/Hepburn draw and stamp of approval. I was only 13 when the movie came out, but I remember it being quite shocking. This movie was made before Nixon was president, before Martin Luther King was assassinated, before Archie Bunker - and, if I remember correctly, before the first Romney ran for president.
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