Rating: 
Summary: Watch it for Spence.
Review: "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is a ham-handed propaganda piece salvaged only by the presence of Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The plot (and I'm going to give it all away, so don't read if you don't want to know) centers around a young girl, Joey, and her fiance, played by Sidney Poitier. After a courtship of only ten days, they are engaged and will shortly marry. Joey takes her intended to meet her parents (Hepburn and Tracy), and the film centers about their reaction, over the course of an afternoon, to their daughter's engagment to a black man.It's a typical setup for a "message" film: you know that at the end, everyone will embrace racial tolerance, and all will be well. It's a fine premise, and the pity is that the writer and director managed to pull it off so poorly even with such a superb ensemble of actors. The film is populated with stereotypes. Hepburn is the patrician but understanding mother. Tracy is the FDR liberal (we know this because he keeps a huge portrait of FDR on his desk) who must now take the final step and face his prejudices -- a 1967 metaphor for LBJ's self-assumed "completion" of the New Deal, perhaps? Tilly, the black maid, is ornery and suspicious (reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara's Mammy, she yells at Poitier for being an "nigger" who "doesn't know his place"). All the young people (including the vapid Joey) are portrayed as dancing, progressive, free-lovin' free spirits, talking breezily about their cohabitations and sleepovers. I know it's set in San Francisco, but the hipster hipness makes one ache. Poitier's mother is a longsuffering, saintly woman; his father is a ridiculous foil who exists mostly so Poitier can make a tedious speech about how the "young generation" needs the "old generation" to "get off our backs!" (Given that Poitier is playing a 37-year old man, this speech serves mostly to make one laugh.) Most egregiously of all (and most damaging to the film's premise), Poitier plays anything but an average Joe: instead, he's a world-famous physician who cured thousands in the Third World and regularly jets between Geneva and New York. This conceit alone would have fatally undercut the dramatic tension in the parents' reactions (how much better would it have been had Poitier been a construction worker, or a typist); paired with the predictable and two-dimensional characters, it annihilates it. In the end, then, the film's premise is swamped with its static characters and preachy dialogue. Then there's the question of plot plausibility. As my fiancee pointed out, "They're all focusing on her marrying a black man. Why doesn't anyone care about the real problem? She got engaged in ten days!" Exactly. Now, there are some reasons to watch this movie. Those reasons are Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. Despite being saddled with bad writing and little to do, Tracy in particular manages to shine forth in his last film. The expressions on this old man's face are priceless, and he evokes what little emotional reaction can be drawn from this movie in his evident love for his wife and daughter. Even his tedious speech at the end (in which he declares that "what we feel" is more important than "what we think") there is a gem wherein he reminisces about how his wife made him feel when he was young. The viewer knows that he is speaking directly to Hepburn as Hepburn: priceless and moving. Hepburn herself has considerably less to do, but she is allowed a delicious scene of calculated (if just) brutality early in the film. The scene wherein they go to get ice cream, and Tracy is forced to interact with young people who are alternately condescending, apathetic, or hostile, is a moving cameo of an America that was not changing for the better. It is also an perhaps-unintentional farewell to a particular type of film star, and a particular type of film. In short, watch this because you want to see Spencer Tracy's last movie. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy predictable preaching.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting look back
Review: 1967 doesn't seem that long ago until you see this movie. An interracial couple (gasp!).
Anyway, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn can't make a bad movie, so even if this film drops into cliches every once in a while, it's still wonderful.
But one question: Why is Poitier's character so much more educated, introspective and deep than his boring financee? I'd be telling Poitier, look, honey, you can do a lot better. You don't need to settle for this uninteresting waif.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed, but important film
Review: 1967's Guess Who's Coming To Dinner probably raised more than a few eyebrows at the time of it's release. Sadly though, if you can not put yourself in the mindset of that time, the potential emotional impact of the film will be lost on you.
Set in the San Fransisco of the late 1960's, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner tells the story of Joanna Drayton (Katharine Houghton) bringing her boyfriend of a mere 10 days, Dr. John Wade Prentice (Sidney Poitier), home to meet her parents. What the parents (played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn) don't know is A)she is coming home, B)that she has a boyfriend she is planning to marry C)that said boyfriend is African-American and that D)said boyfriend is 14 years older than she.
Dr. Prentice informs Joey's parents of his intentions to marry their daughter, but also informs them he will not marry Joanna without their permission. To further complicate matters though, they only have this one day to decide if they approve as he is due to leave for Geneva Switzerland for a job. What ensues is a family's hopes and dreams for their daughter being analyzed and re-thought in the span of a mere few hours. Trying to decide if their daughter's happiness should outweigh the inevitable hardships she will face in a relationship such as this.
The film spares no time in setting up just how happy the new couple are, and also does not waste time in letting you know the difficulties an interracial couple will face at this time in American history. Sadly though, it goes wrong in several other areas that are disturbing. The cookie-cutter characters in this film abound. The Irish Catholic Monsignor, the wise-to-the-world African American housekeeper and the busy-body friend of the Mother who has to be put in her place. If you can look pass these worn out, two-dimensional characters though, there is a poignant story of how love truly should conquer all.
Going back and watching a film that deals with race relations from a different time period can, however, be enlightening. Not once do you hear the term "African American". You do hear the "N" word once, but it is used by the housekeeper towards Dr. Prentice. It is still shocking to hear it blurted out all of a sudden, but again, you have to remember the time frame the film was made in.
This is a difficult review to write though. This movie is flawed, but do you rate it based on its obvious film making flaws, or the merits of a story that needed to be told? I think in the end you have to go with the story. The story is basic, simple and timeless, don't judge a book by it's cover, and don't care what the rest of the world thinks. For that, and its place in cinematic history, it deserves 4 stars.
Sadly, the DVD though only gets 2 stars. It does feature a gorgeous transfer of the film, and does offer both widescreen and full screen versions. However, the lone extra is the original theatrical trailer. Certainly there must have been something they could have included in the form of a commentary track for one of AFI's Top 100 Films Of The 20th Century. A sad, little trailer is all it gets? Pathetic.
On a side note, this is also a sad movie to watch as you know Spencer Tracy passed away only 17 days after filming completed. You can also see the early signs of Katherine Hepburn beginning to show signs of trembling that would later be so well known. It was a fine film for both noteworthy actors.
Four stars for the film
Two stars for the DVD
Rating: 
Summary: Not as affectual as was in '67, yet interesting to an extent
Review: A hush-hush idea among blacks and whites then isn't as strong now, yet provides an OK perception of strength over adversity with Poitier (although not in his best role) excelling as a pretty believable African American doctor. Yet that Katherine Houghton who plays Poitier's bride-to-be is so stale, one-sided and unconvincing that she nearly ruins the film. Mediocre, but worth seeing if your interests include films on color differences.
Rating:
Summary: KRAMER MAKES ANOTHER IMPORTANT AND TIMELY MOVIE
Review: A prominent Australian filmmaker once commented, the job of a film director is to entertain. If he can teach or get a message across while entertaining that's even better. Kramer is one of those filmmakers who managed to do both, and he generally succeeded. Look at what Kramer made, before he put GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER on the screen: ON THE BEACH (1959 about nuclear war); INHERIT THE WIND (1960 about religion versus the Darwinian theory of evolution in Tennessee); JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG (1961, raising question about world culpability in the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis). There are no flies on Kramer. I recall the stir created by GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER when it first came out in 1967. Americans were being tested and challenged, to say the least, by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. At one end, white liberals were risking their lives in the south along side African-American civil rights activists. At the other end, racist bigots north and south were calling activists of any color communists, and much worse. Sometimes, in the heat of the summer with racial tensions and frustrations rising, some cities were torched. Into this cauldron Kramer dropped GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER. I can still recall white liberals and radicals condemning Sydney Poitier's character with slurs such as "super spade" because Kramer seemd he felt obliged to create an African-American male hero who could walk on water. In Kramer's world, an American black man had to be superman merely to qualify for marrying a middle class attractive, white air head. The bigots condemned the film because .... well, that's what bigots do. I believe that Kramer did what he thought was necessary for telling the story of an interracial marriage in1960s America. And, as a matter of fact, when all is said and done he may have hit the nail on the head. He showed what kind of fantastic credentials an African-American male needed for even the most super liberal white father to accept him as a son-in-law for his carefully cultivated, racially oblivious daughter. So then, while today's racially enlightened viewer may be offended by such directorial excesses, Kramer's point was, I think, that this is how bad things are in America. A white super liberal has a lot of trouble with his daughter marrying an African-American superman. If that was what Kramer was up to with this film, then his point was well taken! For the many Tracy-Hepburn reasons others mentioned here, a lot of pathos was added to the film. My complaint is somewhat trivial .... but it has some merit, I think. The occasional crude and rude manner in which the character played by Tracy expresses himself to his daughter and wife seemed out of character. He was supposed to be a gruff two-fisted, newspaperman. But when near the end of the movie he barks at his daughter to "shut up" and later asks Tillie their maid, "when the hell are we eating?" this was out of character. It was poor directing rather than poor acting. Of course, Tracy was literally only a few days from actually dying of cancer. And so one can jump to the conclusion that Tracy's medical condition caused the lapses. But after Tracy's absolutely superb soliloquey in the last minutes of GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, Kramer owed it to Tracy to make his excit scene both in the film and in life perfect. Tracy could have done it with Kramer's help. Because Kramer allowed his film to be made less than perfectly, I couldn't give it a perfect 5-star rating. Otherwise, Kramer succeeded in getting an important social message across while at the same time entertaining. This makes GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER an excellent, if occasionally flawed, work of art.
Rating: 
Summary: A must-see for people about to get married
Review: A touching film about the conflict between one's ideals (what one preaches) and one's encounters with the harsh truth when faced with it himself. A spell-binding account of the interaction between the parents and the child when the child takes an important decision like inter-racial marriage.
Rating:
Summary: Even with its faults, it's still a good watch
Review: A white liberal couple's beliefs are tested when their daughter announces her engagement to a black man. I liked this movie, but I found a couple of things in the plot to be quite unbelievable...like the Poitier character and his white fiancee didn't really seem to have any kind of rapport. If these two were in love, maybe I missed something, because it didn't show. Plus the girl seems to be TOO naive not to see that her marrying a black man would cause some controversy. I can't believe the writers made her that dumb. I guess they were trying to make her so much in love that her man's race wasn't even a factor, so I can kind of understand what they were going for. But other than that, the performances in this film are great. Spencer Tracy's speech at the end is priceless, and watching Katherine Hepburn watch HIM is too much...This movie, even though it was made in 1967 when interracial couples had a rougher time of it, does make you think, though...how would you feel if it were YOUR son or daughter in this same position? Just how liberal are you?
Rating:
Summary: You Can't Help But Like This Movie
Review: A wonderful film about a subject that is still all too controversial today. Some of the earnest upper middle class white liberal talk sounds sort of silly now, but the sentiment is right on and the acting (at least Hepburn and Tracy) is superb. Sidney Poitier grimaces and emotes a bit too much and luckily Katharine Houghton never really went on to anything else, but other than that, a good supporting cast. Little bits of silly '60's camp (the go-go dancing delivery boy) make for unexpected fun.
Rating:
Summary: An All-time Classic
Review: Aside from calmly, reasonably confronting a social taboo of the '60s -- racially mixed marriages -- in a thoughtful, touching manner, this film features career-high performances from several of Hollywood's finest. Spencer Tracy is absolutely brilliant in his final screen appearance as the avowed liberal newspaper publisher Matt Drayton, who, along with his idealistic wife (a role that earned Katherine Hepburn her second Best Actress Oscar) learns that their barely-20-year-old daughter is planning to elope with a black physician (played with cool passion by Sidney Poitier). The story evolves from Poitier's confidence in the two shocked parents that, without their full approval, the marriage will not go on -- and there are only hours to decide. Add his parents to the mix, and as the list of dinner guests grows so does the tension. Aside from the marvelous script, memorable performances and outstanding direction, photography and music there is a chemistry in the mix that truly creates an energy greater than the sum of its parts -- and when the parts are this good, the result is a film for the ages that goes straight to the heart of themes like love, passion, prejudice and family conflict. In the end love does conquor all in Tracey's powerful final speech, made more poignant by a visibly moved and misty Hepburn -- perhaps cognizant that she was witnessing the final curtain call of a great actor. This is the magic Hollywood is capable of, a movie that re-affirms one's faith in the ideals of love and equality, and certainly belongs in every collection.
Rating:
Summary: I'm coming to dinner
Review: Bad music, carnivorism (I'm a vegetarian), and a sachrine-sweet atmosphere. So what makes this movie so great? It's wake-up call to anyone who still thinks interracial relationships are taboo. Seriously though, it sets a good message despite the dude being about 15 years older, it's hillarious (especially the dance scene with the maid's assistant and the deli delivery boy), and Katharine Houghton is NOT a bad actress, despite what others may say. I think she plays her over-enthusiastic character quite well.
This review is not sarcasm, I assure you. No, I don't support the killing of animals, but that's such a small part of the story (turtle soup and deli) that it's hardly worth mentioning. A great move made in a time of racial turmoil. This may have even inspired the kiss between Captain Kirk and Communications Officer O'Hura.
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