Word: hepburn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner reads like an Arthur Goldberg speech, one of his more interminable. It is the ninth and last film to employ the talents of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and for that distinction a picture worth seeing; but on all other counts it stinks. Stanley Kramer has degenerated from one of Hollywood's more interesting bad moviemakers into one of its most maudlin. The crude but somehow compelling live-TV quality of Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools, painted with crayon and musicalized by DeVol, blessed with Sidney Poitier, reveals Kramer...
...Tracy and Hepburn, whatever the social benefits of their friendship with Kramer, the creative harvest has been disaster. Always a good actor, Tracy emerged from a post-war recharging period literally the top. In George Cukor's Pat and Mike ('52), he gave the best of a memorable series of comedy performances opposite Hepburn, conclusively reconciling his own considerable presence ("treelike" to extend a comparison of Hepburn's) with acting. Bad Day at Black Rock ('55), though not a great movie, gave Tracy the chance to show off his genius freely and create a hero good for all violent communities...
...thankless roles, Tracy and Hepburn cannot be faulted, nor appreciated. Hepburn gets the worse end of the deal, called on almost constantly to cast a sympathetic, tear-filled glance at Tracy. Poitier, for whom this was supposed to be a break away from type-casting, suffers as usual from the vacuous goodness of his character; Miss Houghton suffers from the inevitable comparison with Hepburn, who has aged more excitingly than any actress alive, and at 60 maintains a peerless presence...
...Hepburn's proper genre is comedy; it is Tracy for whom this dreary picture should be seen: a face crammed with hills and valleys, a veritable relief map of the United States...
...three other major roles, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston as the other two menacers, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Miss Hepburn's husband, are fine. It is interesting to speculate that Crenna and Zimbalist could almost have reversed roles without altering the film. But then again, Efrem Zimbalist as a menace? Who would believe...