Stanley Kramer (1967)
The score by Frank DeVol sounds like something from the fifties (or earlier) and incorporates a version of ‘The Glory of Love’ (which dates from 1936) but it’s the ineffable attempts to be ‘with it’ that make the film so embarrassing. The original poster for this interracial marriage drama bears the tagline ‘A love story of today’. At one point, the Draytons, the late middle-aged couple played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, go to a drive-in café, where teenagers are grooving strenuously to music on a transistor radio. In a truly aberrant sequence, a white delivery boy and a sexy mixed race girl who helps with the cleaning at the Draytons’ impressive San Francisco home prance away from the house together in an incipient dance routine (which, thank goodness, doesn’t go any further). This unfortunately comes across as suggesting, as much as youthful high spirits, that interracial love is able to bloom carelessly among the lower orders (it’s just as well that the Draytons’ straight-talking black housemaid Tillie is bigoted). There’s supposed to be a considerable age difference, as well as a racial one, between the Draytons’ daughter, Joey, and the black doctor she’s going to marry. He’s 37, she’s 23. It’s fortunate that no one is concerned about this because Katharine Houghton’s Joey looks as deep into her thirties as Sidney Poitier, who plays the doctor. (He was close to 40 when he made the film; Houghton had just turned 30.) Although it’s both the mothers who react in thunderstruck silence when they first meet their child’s intended and see the colour of his/her skin, they instantly get over it. The two fathers find it harder to come to terms with – the film comes close to the ludicrous proposition that having a problem with mixed marriage is exclusive to older men.
The Losey film Time Without Pity which we saw recently, purportedly an anti-capital punishment tract, had to make clear, in order to make its point, that the condemned man was innocent of the murder of which he’d been convicted. In a similar way, Stanley Kramer, to make the case for interracial marriage, not only casts the iconic and irreproachable Poitier as Dr John Prentice but, with the screenwriter William Rose, gives the character a stunning CV – a maxima cum laude academic history, a nobly humanitarian career, a tragic family life (John’s first wife and their child were killed some years previously). Joey Drayton’s father Matt is a renowned liberal (he has a framed photograph of FDR on the desk in his study to prove it) but Kramer and Rose give hardly any sense of how Matt feels, as he experiences the conflict between his ethical and political principles and his gut reaction to Joey’s whirlwind romance and marital intentions. The attempts to appeal to as wide an audience as possible (and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was a big box-office hit) are exemplified by the role of the priest, Monsignor Ryan, and his relationship with the family. Although he’s Catholic (therefore likes a tipple), he’s racially enlightened. The Draytons are not themselves religious – Matt sees the Monsignor on the golf course rather than at mass.
It’s hard to believe that William Rose’s screenplay was written directly for the screen (harder still to believe that it won the Academy Award – against, among others, Bonnie and Clyde!) The artificial urgency of the situation (the action takes place in the course of a single day, Joey and John having set a tight deadline for receiving her parents’ blessing), the essentially one-set location, the series of exchanges between pairs or other combinations of characters to talk through and neatly confirm and resolve the issues of the story – these all reek of the well-made play. The screenplay is remarkably mechanical in the way that it moves prejudice around from one character to another to keep the thing going (as, for example, when Christina fires her work colleague Hilary St George: that name is a giveaway).
The performances in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner are famous: partly because this was the last screen appearance together of Hepburn and Tracy, who was desperately sick when the film was being made and died before it was released; partly because the role of Dr Prentice epitomises the way in which Poitier – the noblest negro of them all – had come to be cast. (By coincidence, we’d watched a programme about Reeves and Mortimer’s Shooting Stars the evening before we saw Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. The excerpts included, as one of the ‘true or false’ questions: ‘Bill Cosby was the first ever black man’. The answer, which Johnny Vegas got right, was false; unusually, Bob Mortimer’s explanation had a simple satirical logic: ‘Of course it’s false: the first ever black man was of course Sidney Poitier’.) In spite of this, Poitier does a respectable job – especially when he’s allowed to be light-hearted. Unfortunately, he’s required to be sanctimonious much more often. It’s hard not to see Tracy’s acting as remarkable chiefly in terms of his skill in concealing his mortal illness; I found myself almost relieved to do that because the role was so thinly written.
Hepburn’s arrival on the scene gives the stiff proceedings an injection of verve and fluidity, as she rattles through her opening lines (Kramer should have gone for much more overlapping dialogue throughout the rest of the cast but Hepburn seems to do enough for all of them put together). After that – and after Christina Drayton’s snap conversion to her daughter’s point of view – you lose interest in the character that Hepburn’s playing, though she herself remains riveting, albeit for mainly the wrong reasons. You wonder why she takes so long to remove the coat and silly cap in which she makes her entrance. You can’t help noticing the beginnings of her Parkinson’s tremor. You watch her eyes repeatedly fill with tears. In the climactic scene, when Matt Drayton gives Joey and John his blessing, putting us out of our misery too, he tells the young(er) couple that he knows they love each other and that, ‘If you have half of what we had …’ – and he looks at Christina. This moment is all about Tracy talking about and looking at Hepburn. You would need a heart of stone not to be moved by it and I welled up with her.
Katharine Houghton was Hepburn’s niece and her aunt got her the part of Joey. In her interview with Mark Harris for Scenes from a Revolution – The Birth of the New Hollywood, Houghton was rightly but likeably modest about the limits of her talent as a screen actress. Beah Richards, as Poitier’s mother, conveys much more with a look than with a line (I found it hard to tell whether Mrs Prentice was meant to be trying and failing to sound posh). Roy Glenn does the necessary as her husband, as does Virginia Christine as the egregious Hilary. Isabel Sanford as Tillie is playing what amounts to a black Thelma Ritter role, with energy but rather less variety than the prototype. Cecil Kellaway, although his Oirish accent seems to come and go a bit, fares better with the impossible role of the Monsignor than it and Stanley Kramer deserve.
30 August 2009
