New Movies: Integrated Hearts & Flowers

“Yes, but would you like your daughter to marry one?” This cliche question gets a cliche answer in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie that once again proves Producer Stanley Kramers ability to put together cinematic bouquets of platitudes about importantsounding social issues. Marriage between whites and blacks is hardly a major national concern, but it is happening more frequently—and the notion undoubtedly worries some people of both races. Kramer’s new film bravely sets out to face the problem but ends up merely offering a great big heaping tablespoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

The characters and casting are all but archetypical. For a crusty old bear of a liberal newspaper publisher and his dashing, efficient career wife, who else but Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn starring in their ninth movie together? For the Negro fiancé, who else to choose but the smooth and handsome Sidney Poitier? What would Poitier’s mother be if not sweet and sensitive, and Beah Richards (Raisin in the Sun, The Miracle Worker) is the best sweet-and-sensitive Negro mother in all of show business.

Smoke Signals. These old familiar faces go into action when the eager, idealistic daughter of Tracy and Hepburn turns up unexpectedly at their mansion with a fiance who is just as black as she is blonde. Everyone is poleaxed by the news: Hepburn puts on that blank stare one remembers from Bringing Up Baby. Tracy’s seamed old face knits together, and his chin goes up like that of an Indian chief reading threatening smoke signals. The Negro maid upbraids Poitier as a “smooth-talking, smart-ass nigger” taking advantage of her little girl. Only the family friend, lovable Monsignor Ryan (Cecil Kellaway), is unfazed, as a good Catholic priest should be.

The situation being carefully stacked by the scriptwriters, Poitier, of course, is no ordinary Negro. Not only handsome, charming and intelligent, he is also an M.D. with enough degrees, honors and professorships behind him to make Ralph Bunche feel like an underachiever. Mother Hepburn is soon won over to his side; Father Tracy greatly admires the boy but sees too much unhappiness ahead to give his approval. The same attitudes are echoed by Poitier’s mother and father, a retired mailman. These are the guess-whos that come to dinner—or rather a prolonged cocktail hour, during which everybody pairs off and talks each other into a happy ending.

It is a sentimental film and a sentimental occasion. Tracy and Hepburn were appearing before the cameras together for the last time, and they knew it; ailing for years, Tracy died of heart failure less than three weeks after the picture was completed. His final performance was just exactly what it should be: a sincere, concentrated, honest portrait of a sincere, concentrated, honest man who might as well have been Spencer Tracy.

The movie was both a fond farewell for Katharine Hepburn’s old friend and a professional coming out for her niece, Katharine Houghton, 22, who plays the daughter. She has Hepburnesque coloring, high cheekbones and broad A’s, and she is far more convincing than most stage daughters. As an actress, she has little to do but bubble with in nocent enthusiasm; Kramer has sidestepped anything as embarrassing as an integrated love scene.