Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967)
A girl's upper-middle class parents are shaken up when their
daughter becomes engaged to a black man. Sadly, this is a
predictably soft Hollywood look at race relations.
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are unforgettable as the
perplexed parents in this landmark 1967 movie about mixed
marriage. Joanna (Katharine Houghton), is the beautiful daughter
of crusading publisher Matthew Drayton (Tracy), and his patrician
wife, Christina (Hepburn).
Joanna returns home from vacation in Hawaii with her new
fiancée, John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), a distinguished black
doctor. Christina accepts her daughter's decision to marry John,
but Matthew is shocked by this interracial union; and the doctor's
parents are equally dismayed. Both families must sit down face to
face and examine each other's level of intolerance.
The situation becomes even more entangled when John tells
Matthew that he won’t marry Joanna without his blessing, a
factor that is exacerbated by the couple’s insistence that they
get hitched immediately, which means Matthew has to decide within
a few hours.
The scenario becomes even more muddled when John’s parents
(Roy Glenn and Beah Richards) fly up from LA to meet their future
daughter-in-law.
The movie was Spencer Tracy's final film appearance and
featured Oscar-winning work from Katharine Hepburn and
screenwriter William Rose.
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