SYNOPSIS

Pretty Joey Drayton comes home from a ten-day Hawaiian vacation with the man she loves, John Prentice, a forty-year-old internationally respected Negro doctor. Joey is determined not only to marry him immediately, but to have both sets of parents' blessings. The couple must leave that night for Geneva and the doctor's post with the World Health Organization. Matt and Christina Drayton are extremely likeable, intelligent, wealthy, and hard working. He owns and operates a crusading newspaper in San Francisco and she runs an avant-garde art gallery. Now both are faced with a true test of their liberal beliefs. Further tension is introduced when the man's parents fly up from Los Angeles for dinner at the Draytons' and find themselves as shocked and dismayed as the girl's parents.

CRITIQUES

"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner gives us another opportunity to flog Stanley Kramer for his naive conception of social significance. If Kramer were not so vulnerable in his sincerity, he would not have made such a tempting target. Unfortunately, Kramer is simply not a very good director. He lacks the intuitive feel for the medium, the instinctively kinetic insight into dramatic materials. He does everything by the numbers, and the lumbering machinery of his technique is always in full view of the audience.

"The casting is wildly uneven. Katharine Hepburn and the late Spencer Tracy are out of sight on the uppermost level. Sidney Poitier stays within reason in the middle level, and the rest is chaos, contrivance, and caricature.

"The character he (Tracy) plays had been accused by a Negro mother of having grown old and having forgotten what love and desire were really like. As Tracy repeats the charge to himself, Kramer shifts deliberately to a profile shot of Tracy on the left foreground of the screen and Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, on the right background looking at Tracy, and Tracy says no I have not forgotten, and he says it very slowly, and the two shot is sustained in its ghostly immortality, recording the rapturous rapport between a being now dead and a being still alive, but a moment of life and love passing into the darkness and death everlasting and anyone in the audience remaining dry-eyed through this evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty has my deepest sympathy."

COMMENTARY TRACK

"The most completely thorough, driving, constantly-seeking actress with whom I've been associated....she's never really satisfied; she never stops thinking about what she's doing and about what everybody else is doing...She is a marvellous woman, who has a capacity for many emotional areas, and she has a great talent. She can trigger an emotional truth at precisely the right time. I don't know what she draws on; it's a deep, deep well."

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