Guess who wasn’t coming to dinner at your house in 1967…
Well, if you grew up in a white family, it’s a pretty good bet that a handsome black guy—a doctor!—wasn’t planning on sitting down to dinner and telling you he planned to marry your daughter.
That’s the reality that was.
So, about 50 years ago, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton and Beah Richards and Roy Glenn got crazy in Hollywood and filmed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was a blockbuster. Houghton (daughter) and Poitier (doctor) played lovely young people who were in love, and everybody got with the program by the end of the movie, and they lived happily ever after. (There were Oscars, click here).
It’s a poignant and dramatically dynamic movie. Every character throws firecrackers at least a couple times, and everybody catches the firecrackers with high art and deftly normalized social criticism and passionate declarations about the right thing.
I’ve watched it several times. For me, it doesn’t get old. I like to live in the world with people who say “If you love somebody, you gotta love somebody, so go ahead and do it.”
The movie turned a lot of heads, but I’m guessing it didn’t change a whole lot of minds.
….and don’t forget that the last recorded lynching of a black man (Michael Donald) in America was near Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not his best…
click here
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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© 2020 – 2023, Richard Subber. All rights reserved.