Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner reads like an Arthur Goldberg speech, one of his more interminable. It is the ninth and last film to employ the talents of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and for that distinction a picture worth seeing; but on all other counts it stinks. Stanley Kramer has degenerated from one of Hollywood's more interesting bad moviemakers into one of its most maudlin. The crude but somehow compelling live-TV quality of Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools, painted with crayon and musicalized by DeVol, blessed with Sidney Poitier, reveals Kramer to be an exceedingly dull thinker and hardly any artist at all.

For Tracy and Hepburn, whatever the social benefits of their friendship with Kramer, the creative harvest has been disaster. Always a good actor, Tracy emerged from a post-war recharging period literally the top. In George Cukor's Pat and Mike ('52), he gave the best of a memorable series of comedy performances opposite Hepburn, conclusively reconciling his own considerable presence ("treelike" to extend a comparison of Hepburn's) with acting. Bad Day at Black Rock ('55), though not a great movie, gave Tracy the chance to show off his genius freely and create a hero good for all violent communities everywhere, always. Again in The Old Man and The Sea ('57), this time more emphatically, Tracy staged the trick of giving a fine performance, dominating the picture, and yet failing somehow to elevate the whole product to his own level.

Then came Kramer, Judgment at Nuremberg, still the most polished of his creations, cast Tracy as a New England judge set adrift in the land of war criminals and called on to apply his raw honesty to the ambiguities of complicit guilt and collective responsibility. Tracy exuded New Englandisms and was honest as a rock; but he could carry it no further, because Kramer's picture never achieved even the subtlety of a good Playhouse 90 (Judgment at Nuremberg), incidentally, like Ship of Fools, improves measurably when shown on the home screen). Worse yet was It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, a comedy without a laugh bigger than its title. Here truly were the ghastly deeps of Tracy's career, coming at a time when his potential seemed boundless. By comparison with Mad World, Guess Who is Harding to Cox, a triumph.

Tracy plays a liberal newspaper editor who comes home one afternoon to find his daughter (Katharine Houghton) engaged to a too-too successful doctor (Sidney Poitier) who, in the jargon of the early 60's, "happens to be a Negro." Of course the liberal editor turns out to have trouble practicing what he preaches, whereon the plot of the movie is hinged. William Rose's screenplay offers humor (the girl's parents' reaction on meeting Poitier; his parents' reaction on meeting Miss Houghton), suspense (who will talk to whom in which room next?), and incisive social commentary (we are brothers under the skin). Some reviewers have been kind enough to call it a drawing-room comedy, but in reality Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is depressingly serious.

In thankless roles, Tracy and Hepburn cannot be faulted, nor appreciated. Hepburn gets the worse end of the deal, called on almost constantly to cast a sympathetic, tear-filled glance at Tracy. Poitier, for whom this was supposed to be a break away from type-casting, suffers as usual from the vacuous goodness of his character; Miss Houghton suffers from the inevitable comparison with Hepburn, who has aged more excitingly than any actress alive, and at 60 maintains a peerless presence.

But Hepburn's proper genre is comedy; it is Tracy for whom this dreary picture should be seen: a face crammed with hills and valleys, a veritable relief map of the United States.