Has held up over time
It is amazing how contemporary this movie feels despite being released in 1967. The dialogue and story have held up for 45 years!
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MovieChat Forums > Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) Discussion > Has held up over time
What's amazing is the thickness of your blinders. This film is the last gasp of the left-liberal color blind affectation. The crucial scene is the confrontation between the father and the son, the latter declaring that the difference between them is that the father thinks of himself as a black man, but he, the son, thinks of himself only as a man. The film makers evidently hoped that the son represented the wave of the future, but in fact the father's viewpoint was in the ascendant. The "black is beautiful" movement and the intensely race conscious paradigm of the post-civil rights movement were the wave of the future and the left liberals were shortly to cave in and support racial preferences and quotas, at first purported to be temporary measures and then become permanent fixtures. So, far from being contemporary, this film is an antique of a left liberal outlook that now is regarded as right wing.
shareYou are misinterpreting what was going on in the film. The son is saying that his father sees himself as a black man as they were viewed at the time as a kind of second class person who needed to accept his status. The son is saying that he rejects that way of viewing himself. He considers himself to be a man equal to any other man. Neither of them was referring to the "black is beautiful" movement. You are incorrectly applying post film politics to a film made in 1967.
shareI'll watch it again to take a second look, but my recollection is that the father's focus on his color did not stem from any acceptance of second hand status. Also, I believe that the "black is beautiful" movement, if not the phrase itself, was already evident by 1967; whites were already persona non grata in organizations that were formerly for civil rights but increasingly otherwise. I'll research this to make sure.
shareA quick followup: The head of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, issued the slogan "Black Power" in June of 1966 and the Black Panther Party was launched later that same year. It's a bit ironic that Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was being made at the same time its racial outlook was in the process of being rejected by the new generation of Blacks.
shareI've rewatched the film and confirmed that there is no indication that the father accepts second class status. His sole basis for objecting to the son's marriage plan is the hostility it would arouse; indeed, as he says, in some states (with anti-miscegenation laws) it would be illegal. We're really left with no basis for the son's accusation that the father sees himself as a "colored man" and no reason to infer that the son sees him as accepting of second class status. To raise another point, I was struck upon rewatching by an early scene in which the daughter is telling her mother about her intended and says that his name is John Wade Prentice and isn't that a beautiful name. What if his name had been Hispanic, Jewish, Italian or some other "ethnic" name instead of the Waspy one she is so enthused about? Is this consistent with a character who would have had no prejudice about engaging in an interracial relationship?
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