Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer’s wildly popular attempt at social commentary on race relations in the 1960’s, is a very frustrating film to analyze. The movie’s single greatest—and completely impossible to ignore—flaw can also be argued as its greatest strength.
The most important thing for modern audiences is to get the context right here. The 1960’s were a time of Civil Rights progress matched by horrendous public demonstrations of racial intolerance. The two leading members of that movement were both brutally assassinated which in turn led to race rioting in several major cities as well as the growth of the Black Power movement which, in turn, scared many white people in America to their very core. This profoundly misplaced fear of “blacks” rising up to kill whites and take over the country brought the America of the 1960’s to an apex of racial tension not experienced since Reconstruction.
And into the midst of this craziness director Stanley Kramer made a film designed specifically to comment upon this state of affairs by creating turmoil among a white liberal upper crust California family who had just found out their pretty daughter was going to marry a black man. The "who" coming to dinner here is played by an actor pretty much synonymous with the 1960’s racial revolution relative to Hollywood and filmmaking: Sidney Poitier. He was the first black man to win a Best Actor Oscar as well as the first black actor of either sex to become a bona fide star capable of filling cinemas with audiences of every color. Even more importantly: despite the fact that his most famous films generally tend to focus on racial issues, he had also by 1967 proven himself capable of playing characters who could have been black or white within stories where the color of his skin wasn't the central focus of the plot.
And therein lies the problem with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; or, to be precise, half the problem. Not only is the black man marrying the white daughter played by an actor who had essentially made most of his audience color blind to the color of his skin, but the character he is playing is a graduate of Johns Hopkins, teaches at Yale, writes textbooks and works with the World Health Organization. In other words, he’s everything that the two white parents could possibly want in a husband for their daughter, except he has black skin.
Richard Pryor, he isn't. Malcolm X, he most certainly is not. In fact, even the white couple’s black maid barely recognizes him as a black man. The only possible negative consideration that could cause the cultural uproar that drives the narrative is the color of his skin because it certainly is not any cultural stereotypes or ethnic peculiarities that give away his heritage. In other words, what do these people have a problem with? Make him a militant Black Panther calling for racial war and the overthrow of the white patriarchy and now they should be concerned, right?
Well, that is one way of looking at it. Of all the actors at all the times in all the roles of all the movies about race relations made by Hollywood, Sidney Poitier excelled in being charming, proud, and averse to real divisiveness. That is the great flaw of the film, yet paradoxically it is also its greatest strength. Because if it is true that pretty much any white family in American in 1967 would be happy to see their daughter marry a young man who inspires such insidiously racist description as "being a white man in black skin"—regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, rich or poor, West Coast or Farm Belt—and there is still a cause for concern, then the issue here can only possibly be just one thing: race. And if the issue here is only the color of this upstanding young man’s skin and this aging couple thoroughly represented as the best that American liberalism can produce are STILL instinctively conflicted upon first learning of the situation at hand…the guessing game implied in the title of the film can be effectively extended to the entire state of race relations in America at the time, or even now.
