OK film fans I just got home from watching the Saints triumph in OT over the evil Vikings (GO BEARS!). When I plopped down on the couch to watch some boob tube and mellow out before the start of a new week I was pleasantly surprised to run across an old favorite. Some films are sentimental favorites because of a time or place they remind us of; some are sentimental because of the person we saw it with. Tonight's film is sentimental because it always reminds me of a single person, my mom.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released in December of 1967, just about the time my mother found out she was pregnant with me. Stanley Kramer's groundbreaking film, billed as the first film about an interracial couple, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress for the legendary Katherine Hepburn. Additional standout performances by Spencer Tracy, who died before the film's release, and Sidney Poitier create a film that, while dated, deftly explores many of the issues about race we still deal with today.
60's liberal elite newspaper publishing white couple Christina and Matt Drayton, Hepburn and Tracy (an off-screen couple from 1942 until his death that never married as Tracy was a devout Catholic and never divorced his wife) find out that their young daughter Joey (Katherine Houghton) is coming home with her fiancee, Dr. John Wade Prentice (Poitier) a world renown black doctor with the World Health Organization. The clever script adds a few more hurdles: they just met in Hawaii on vacation 10 days ago, will be leaving that evening at 10 PM and are seeking their parents' approval before they leave. As a progressive San Franciscan couple they have raised a daughter who is proudly a member of the first generation after the civil rights movement of the era that are attempting to live blindly and somewhat naively, in disregard of the significance of race.
This is a film that asks the same question we ask today, can we live in a post-racial country. Objections come from more than just white people, including the Draytons' black housekeeper Tillie (Isabel Sanford of The Jefferson's in her first film role after 30 years of stage acting) who accuses the Dr of using his education and position to hide from his true identity as a black man with marrying a white woman as the last straw. Things get even worse when Dr. Prentice's parents fly in from Los Angeles for dinner and discover who their son is marrying. His father vehemently objects to the idea and tells his son it is disrespectful in light of the sacrifices the family has made for his education. This leads father and son into an argument over parental responsibility and the growing schism between pre and post civil rights generations, issues still confronted in the black community to this day. While moving, it is the one scene that seems literally out of character, given everything else we see of the respectable Dr. Prentice
The film somewhat detours from taking on the issues of interracial marriage, adverting the issue of whites vs blacks and deals with the more covert issues of "not in my backyard" racism of liberals. It deals with the objections of the fathers by calling into question their judgment and their abilities as fathers which make the issue of race secondary. Instead of playing up cultural differences it deals with the common ground of parents wanting to protect their children from bigots. Instead of a fight between races we have a struggle between a generation that is trying to overcome racism and a generation that thinks we never will.
My mother, like the character Joey, was a proud member of the new post civil rights generation. A woman who was both color blind and more African-American in her soul than many African-Americans I have met, myself included. The hardships she faced as a young woman of an interracial marriage with bi-racial children, which were numerous and disgraceful, are not explored in this film nor any film I am familiar with, which is truly a shame since it is a slice of Americana few are familiar with.
The post civil rights era of the 70s was still rife with overt racism and she never wavered for a moment when confronted by it. She introduced me to this movie when I was a teenager in the 80s and it seemed anachronistic at the time. Now, many years later, I realize how much this film means to mother both as a source of strength during a time as young woman, in rural Iowa, who thought the whole world was against her and as a message of hope for the future of her child. And at that moment she was able to sit in a theater, in front of the silver screen of Hollywood and realize that she was not alone.
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