Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, American comedy-drama film, released in 1967, about a white couple who are forced to confront their liberal political beliefs when their daughter announces her engagement to a Black man. Directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier, the film was a box-office hit and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. It was released a few months after the legal case Loving v. Virginia struck down a ban on interracial marriage, and it is considered a landmark film for its sympathetic treatment of a controversial topic.

Plot and characters

Matt and Christina Drayton (played by Tracy and Hepburn) are a white upper-class couple living in San Francisco, where he works as a newspaper publisher and she owns an art gallery. When their daughter, Joey (Katharine Houghton), returns home from a vacation in Hawaii, she announces that she is marrying John Prentice (Poitier), a Black doctor whom she met 10 days ago and whom she has brought home to meet her family. Upon receiving this news and meeting John, the politically liberal Draytons are stunned. Furthermore, John is traveling to Geneva the next day for his work with the World Health Organization (WHO), so Joey wants to get married as soon as possible.

Joey asks for her parents’ blessing. However, without her knowing, John tells the Draytons that he will not marry her unless they give their express permission. Matt and Christina discuss the matter in private, though they cannot decide whether to allow their daughter to marry John. Christina is in favor of the marriage, but Matt does not want to be rushed into making a decision. Reminding him that they raised their daughter not to be prejudiced, Christina points out that they have always taught her that bigotry is wrong: “And when we said it, we did not add, ‘But don’t ever fall in love with a colored man.’ ”

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Others in the family’s orbit express their views, some supporting the proposed arrangement and some opposing. Among the latter are Hilary St. George (Virginia Christine), a snooty white woman who runs Christina’s gallery, and Matilda (Tillie) Binks (Isabel Sanford), a middle-aged Black woman who works as the family’s maid and distrusts the younger generation’s political views. (At one point, she accuses John of being a troublemaker involved with the Black Power movement.)

That night John’s parents (Roy E. Glenn and Beah Richards) fly in from Los Angeles to meet Joey and her parents. Like Joey, John did not tell his parents beforehand that his fiancée is of a different race, and they are shocked when they meet her at the airport. Back at the Draytons’ home, Mrs. Prentice has a heart-to-heart with Christina and expresses the same view as her, while Mr. Prentice takes the same side as Matt during their private discussion. In a heated conversation between John and his father, John tells him, “You don’t own me” and calls his generation a “dead weight” on the younger generation’s backs. Softening, he tells his father, “You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Prentice expresses to Matt that both he and her husband have forgotten the feeling of young love. Finally, Matt gives his blessing, saying: “The only thing that matters is what they feel and how much they feel for each other.” He warns them that their marriage and love will be up against the prejudice and bigotry of millions of people in the United States, but he concludes that the greater tragedy “would be if, knowing what you two are, knowing what you two have, and knowing what you two feel, you didn’t get married.”

Background and production

The movie opened in December 1967 in the midst of some of the most tumultuous and transformational years of the American civil rights movement. Poitier had made history in 1964 as the first Black actor to win an Oscar for a lead role (as Homer Smith in Lilies of the Field). Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage legal in all the United States, had been decided in June. Despite these positive developments, tragedy lay ahead. A few months after the film’s release, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.

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Producer and director Stanley Kramer had previously directed movies about controversial and sensitive subjects, such as Inherit the Wind (1960), which focused on the Scopes Trial, in which a teacher in Tennessee was arrested and prosecuted for teaching evolution, and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), about the prosecution of war crimes committed by former Nazi leaders. (Both films starred Tracy and earned him Oscar nominations for best actor.)

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was the ninth film collaboration between Tracy and Hepburn (one of Hollywood’s legendary romantic couples) and their final collaboration; Tracy died shortly after principal filming wrapped. In fact, because Tracy was experiencing heart failure during filming, Columbia Pictures, the film’s production studio, could not secure the necessary insurance for him. Instead, Kramer and Hepburn put their salaries in escrow to cover another actor’s costs in case Tracy needed to be replaced.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was also a significant picture for Poitier’s career. That same year he appeared in two other popular films, In the Heat of the Night and To Sir, with Love. As was noted by Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones in 2018, “All three of Poitier’s films that year dealt with race; arguably, no other actor, before or since, so changed racial perceptions in a single year.” Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was the big-screen debut of Houghton, who was Hepburn’s niece. Believing her character to be too much of an apolitical “Pollyanna,” she requested a scene in which Joey confronts her parents, but it was cut from the film.

Reception and awards

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner received fairly positive reviews. It is regarded as one of the first movies to show an interracial relationship with a happy ending, though some critics consider the movie too timid in its portrayal of interracial relationships, arguing that Poitier’s character is unrealistically perfect and was written to be more appealing to a white audience than to Black viewers. In agreement with this view was Houghton, who told Larry King in 2003 that the film was a breakthrough portrayal of “any kind of relationship that’s not approved of” (including same-sex relationships) but that “it was a movie mainly for white people.”

Nevertheless, it was a domestic box-office success, earning about $56 million and becoming one of Columbia Pictures’ most lucrative theatrical features.

The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture, and won two: best actress for Katharine Hepburn and best writing for William Rose.

Legacy

In 1998 it was included on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American films of all time, although it was no longer in the top 100 when the list was revisited for the 10th anniversary edition. In 2017 the film was added to the National Film Registry, a film preservation program established by the U.S. Library of Congress that selects films of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

A remake directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan, Guess Who, was released in 2005. Starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher and featuring more comedy than the original, the reboot flipped the races of the characters, centering on a young Black woman (Zoe Saldaña) who brings home a white boyfriend (Kutcher) to meet her parents (Mac and Judith Scott). In 2017 filmmaker Jordan Peele borrowed the premise of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner for his acclaimed horror movie Get Out, in which a young Black man (Daniel Kaluuya) meets his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time and uncovers a sinister racist plot.