“It never occurred to me that I would fall in love with a Negro, but I have, and nothing's going to change that.”
If made under present marketing conditions, this quote would likely be the movie’s tagline. Doubtlessly, it would be printed in full on posters and the commercial advertising blitz would either open or close each ad with this statement from the young bride-to-be.
“…you're two wonderful people who happened to fall in love and happened to have a pigmentation problem.”
Between the quote above from the daughter and this one from her father lies the entire narrative structure of the film. Everything is intended to move the audience from her point to his acceptance. Don’t take the film too terribly seriously; these are less fully developed characters than symbolic stand-ins for members of the audience - white members, anyway.
“Then go into the office, and make out a check, for "cash," for the sum of $5,000. Then carefully, but carefully Hilary, remove absolutely everything that might subsequently remind me that you had ever been there…and get—permanently—lost. It's not that I don't want to know you, Hilary—although I don't—it’s just that I'm afraid we're not really the sort of people that you can afford to be associated with.”
The putrid evil of racism is personified to a great extent by the Hilary character referred to here. She is employed by Mrs. Drayton in an art gallery and it is one of the film’s subtleties that the most egregiously offensive display of outright racism is perpetrated within a social milieu by a character that most viewers would likely suspect was every bit the kind of paragon of liberalism as Mr. and Mrs. Drayton. Just as John Prentice is really too perfect for any parents to be conflicted over—were he not black—so is Hilary operating on a level of social expectation that only becomes all the more shocking upon reflection.
“…you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”
For the last member of the quartet at the center of the story, this is the irony of the film. John is directing these words toward his father as part of a larger generational critique. John feels that time is moving forward and progress is leaving behind the conventions and expectations of his father’s generation. His father was raised by a society that always placed a condition upon anything he did: he was not just a man, but a black man. John is here saying that times have changed and he can be viewed without that conditional response. Except, of course, he can’t. Because the only reason in the world there is any sort of conflict in this story has to do with just one thing and one thing only: John is not just a man…he is a colored man. Even his fiancee and future father-in-law are guilty of this; just look at their quotes above which both apply conditional rules to their perspectives of John.
