Guess Who

"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", #99/removed, 1967. This movie may be familiar to you if you've see the 2005 remake with Ashton Kutcher and Zoe Saldana (the girl from Avatar and the new Star Trek movie before she was the girl from Avatar and the new Star Trek). I've seen the remake before I watched the original, so I spent a lot of the movie making comparisons between the two. The common set up the parents of a girl meeting her boyfriend, who is of a different race. The biggest difference I noticed between the movies, is that in the remake, the boy is white, and in this original, the boy is black. I was pretty surprised by this, but there are a lot of reasons why the remake needed to make this change. The original was made and takes place right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movements. The couple in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is engaged, and ready to be married quickly. One of the lines in the movie explains that the two of them getting married would actually be illegal in 16 states. That shocked me. So in that movie, it made sense for the parents to struggle with this idea, and they fought many internal battles throughout the movie trying to accept it. These parents actually wanted to accept it. In the remake, they had to switch the racial roles because in the remake, the father was adamant against the boy, which is why the dad had to be black and the boy had to be white. In 2005, it was funny for a black dad to be against a white boyfriend, and it would have been considered horrible for a white dad to be against a black boyfriend.

So, that's my rant on the race issue of it all... now, on to the actual movie critique... this movie was not great. It was pretty slow, and the entire movie took place in one day. There were a few gems in there. Like when this one girl appeared in about three insignificant scenes, and then didn't reappear in anything significant later on. Or the fact that the climax of the movie was a dinner, and more and more guests were added to the dinner, which resulted in the phrase "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" actually being said throughout it. The daughter's reaction when her mother's coworker shows up at the house. But, even with those few gems, I would suggest watching the funnier remake of it before you watch the original.