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Guess Who's Coming To Dinner....

andrew

andrew

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I don't know how I missed this film for 50 years, but I finally got to watch it last night with the family. Very interesting food for thought there re male/female relationships, father/son, father/daughter, mother/son, mother/daughter, in-laws, counter-cultural relationships, etc.

The biggest take-away I'd like to commend to us patriarchal guys is the way the movie handles the differences between female empathy and emotional intelligence and male logic and analytical intelligence. Good example of men learning empathy from women. And Spencer Tracy is epic in his final performance just before his death (production wrapped just 2-1/2 weeks before he died).

Give it a look if you haven't already seen it.
 
Saw it years ago and just remember how the men, regardless or race, and the women, regardless of race, seemed to think similarly. The male and female brains fell in line regardless of color.

Did I remember it correctly?
 
Yep. More to it than that, of course, but that part is correct.
 
One of the things that really struck me (and I don't think it's just Hollywood, it's just how childish our culture has become in the past 50 years) was the way adults with serious conflicts saying serious things would wait for each other to stop speaking and then respond with something intelligent and adult-sounding. You don't see as much of that these days....
 
That's downright sad, highly politicized, and I guess what's to be expected from a college undergrad. Pity.
 
This quote from the course description pretty much sums it up:
Focusing on the cultural politics of race, gender, class, and political ideology, this course....
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I love classic movies and this was a good one. All star cast with Hepbrun, Tracy, and Poitier.

The real life Tracy / Hepburn love affair is instructive as well. Tracy was a hard core Catholic and did not believe in divorce. He was estranged from his wife and was with Hepburn for 26 years but Louise remained his wife. When he died Hepbrun had to uncerimoniously clear out of his apartment. Polygamy might have been a big help to them.
 
mystic said:
A search for the movie's title plus the word "idealized" turns up plenty. Such as this student paper from a cinema course.

I first saw the film maybe two or three years ago.
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Was that it? Just those few paragraphs? I'm assuming this author is all of 20 years old? Not all blacks lived like it was Mississippi Burning each day of their lives. There is a long history of educated, socially and financially affluent blacks in this country. Atlanta's history of "upper crust" blacks is notorious.
 
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In science you control all variables except the one you're measuring. The whole point of the movie setup was that the only thing for the parents not to like about their prospective son-in-law was his skin color (as Tracy referred to it, "a pigmentation problem").
 
Precisely. It's like a blind taste test. If you don't see the label, would you still like/hate it?

Hate to get political, but take away the name and describe Weinstein shenanigans to a Democrat without a name and you will get outrage until you reveal the name.

Describe Trump sexual harassment to a Republican without the name and you get outrage, until you hear the name.

It's called bias.
 
One of my favorites of Poitier.

I'm surprised no one commented on their age difference. I don't recall if they actually stated their ages, but it seemed like they were more than just a couple years apart. (it's been a few years since i've seen it.) i think it was pretty typical of the time and should still be done today.

Just as a side note, my #1 favorite of his was To Sir With Love.
 
NetWatchR said:
I don't recall if they actually stated their ages, but it seemed like they were more than just a couple years apart.
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The couple are referred to in the flick as 37 and 23. IRL, Poitier was 40 and Houghton was 22.

To be fair, the age difference and the rush-rush approach were two other variables that were not controlled. My guess is that the age difference just wasn't that remarkable at the time, and the short fuse on the decision, once accepted by the parents, is what then brought the focus directly onto the 'pigmentation problem'.

As a father I would have taken the time pressure off the table. "I am open to the possibility of this being a good decision, but I need some time to consider this from different angles, and frankly you both do also, so I'm not saying no, and I'm not saying I have reservations, I'm saying I cannot respond to your ultimatum today. If you're going to pitch a fit and call off the engagement because I do not respond to your power play, then you can explain that to my daughter, because that one's on you. But I will not be bullied into an inadequately considered decision that has more to do with my daughter's future happiness than any other decision she or I have ever made in her life, so deal with it."

I have a son and a daughter that have married Hispanics and a daughter engaged to an Indian (doctor!), so obviously I'm not worried about pigmentation, but I'm no fan of 10-day courtships and 7-day engagements (or as we used to say, "whirlwind romances"...).

Back to the point of the OP, I find the movie most interesting for it's illumination of the whole "male brain / female brain" issue. The race issue, the whole big point of the movie, is for my purposes just a foil for the interactions of the mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.
 
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