Word: poitiers
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...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 to be an exceedingly dull thinker and hardly any artist...
Tracy plays a liberal newspaper editor who comes home one afternoon to find his daughter (Katharine Houghton) engaged to a too-too successful doctor (Sidney Poitier) who, in the jargon of the early 60's, "happens to be a Negro." Of course the liberal editor turns out to have trouble practicing what he preaches, whereon the plot of the movie is hinged. William Rose's screenplay offers humor (the girl's parents' reaction on meeting Poitier; his parents' reaction on meeting Miss Houghton), suspense (who will talk to whom in which room next?), and incisive social commentary (we are brothers...
...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...
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER. Stanley Kramer's new film sets out bravely to face the problems of the marriage of a Negro man (Sidney Poitier) to a white girl (Katharine Houghton), but retreats into sugary platitudes despite the rallying performances of Spencer Tracy, as the girl's liberal but reluctant father, and Katharine Hepburn, as her sentimental mother...
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER. Stanley Kramer's new film sets out bravely to face the problems of the marriage of a Negro man (Sidney Poitier) to a white girl (Katharine Houghton) but retreats into sugary platitudes despite the rallying performances of Spencer Tracy, as the girl's liberal but reluctant father, and Katharine Hepburn, as her sentimental mother...