Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (40th Anniversary Edition)
by Stanley Kramer
List Price:
Our Price: $4.98
You Save: $10.01 (67%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Category: DVD
See more DVD details
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD details
Actor: Cecil Kellaway, Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Houghton, Sidney Poitier, Spencer TracyDirector: Stanley Kramer
Brand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 108 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-02-12
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (40th Anniversary Edition)
DVD Review: "Not In This Country! Not In This Stinking World!" "They'll change this country! They'll change this stinking world!"
Summary: 5 Stars
Sometimes a movie isn't a movie - sometimes it's more than that. And "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" is one of those great moments in our troubled existence when a movie took on a real issue and became something more that entertainment, it became important, even a catalyst for change - change that's ongoing to this day.
It starts very badly. A jet plane crosses the city sky to dated girly vocals and naff strings. The lyrics of "The Glory Of Love" waft out at us, "You've got to cry a little...die a little..." Oh God! Immediately you feel this is an overrated and fiercely dated Hollywood outing, and while it may have been groundbreaking then, it's cheesy now. And worse - it seems to be smug and knowing - the Tinsel Town hypocrites doing "brave", but in a typically sanitised and acceptable way.
But then it improves almost immediately. Like a breath of fresh air, Katherine Houghton (niece of Hepburn) and an impossibly handsome and debonair Sidney Poiter float onto the screen beaming and hugging. Immediately they look the part - in love - and ready to take on the whole wide world and its crappy prejudices with a lump hammer. They're met by Virginia Christine, who plays Hilary St. George, assistant to Hepburn's character, Mrs. Drayton. She shiftily eyes the mixed couple and asks with her staunch steely white distaste, "Has something happened? Is anything wrong?" Haughton replies (too much in love to notice the meanness) "Something's happened! But it's right!"
Actually, Houghton is one of the movie's secret weapons; her unfolding strength and joie-de-vie positively invigorating and constantly countering the pontificating of the elders. She, of course, represents young love, youth that doesn't give a fiddlers nadge about other people's opinions because it's empowered and alive. One such example is her conversation with Tilly, the family's black Maid, who's dead set against the union from the off. Haughton reasons. "You so wrong Tilly! You know I've always loved you - and you're just as black as he is! How could it possibly be right for me to love you - and yet be wrong for me to love him?" And on it goes - witty to dark and back again.
Briefly, the story is this; Hepburn comes home to a surprise from her daughter - she's met a man ten days earlier and is deeply in love - or so she claims - but he's a Negro. Dad Tracy comes home too and he's not happy either - even dismissive, decision made too hastily, too much too soon, obvious problems ahead, what were they thinking?? Then Poitier's black parents arrive into town (beautifully played by a graceful Beah Richards and a forceful Roy E. Glenn Snr) and things get very awkward and then very heavy. And it's from here that the movie moves into true greatness with the screenplay by William Rose being one of the heroes of the hour (won the Oscar).
Both parents make good argument. Roy E Glenn Snr. as Poitier's father informs his boy of some sobering facts - their marriage in 1967 is illegal in 17 States (and even now it's chilling to know that fact). Both parents try of course to browbeat their siblings into rethinking their positions, when it should be they, who need to do some "rethinking". But these are good fathers - and with rebuttals, good argument and applied intelligence, both begin to see the light. The scene where Poitier confronts his Dad about a son owing his pater nothing, about his Father's generation being dead weight because they're trapped in the clichés of old they won't try to break free from - is just breathtaking in its writing and scope - shockingly good!
Then it gets better still. Both Beah Richards and Katharine Hepburn agree with the union; they know their men don't - so both try to reason with their opposite. But it's Beah's talk to Tracy (who listens) that swings it; she talks about men being old, becoming stale and then losing their passion and forgetting what it was like to be young and in love and needing somebody like they were the air. It's fantastically written and delivered with grace and poise (she was Oscar nominated). Then Tracy simply spends the next few minutes of screen time pacing about, looking out over the metropolis and thinking. Then he thinks and ruminates a little more. And then a revelation! "I'll be a son of a bitch!" He makes his way back into the house to gather all parties together in the same room to hear THE BIG SPEECH. And it's an absolute knockout! He recaps on each person and their viewpoint - good and bad. He looks at Beah Richards who chastised him - not with malice but with affection. He touches on her point of love diminishing over the years, "Old - yes! Burnt out - certainly! But I can tell you, the memories are still there - clear, intact, indestructible..."
But there are things about the film that grate. For a movie that concerns itself so much with colour and equality, it's extraordinary that the black actors playing Poitier's parents didn't get equal billing with the principal four on the posters and subsequent artwork - despite both being Oscar-nominated! And why does any black person have to have the patriarchal nod from the senior white folks for their union to be ok anyway! But these are more reflections of the time the movie was made. It doesn't detract from it too much. This was a maverick film made with maverick actors in maverick times.
On the 10th of June 1967, aged 67 and just two weeks after filming had finished (it was finally released in March 1968 just in time for Oscars), Spencer Tracy was at home and couldn't sleep. Hepburn was upstairs too - despite her real home being a short distance away. He made himself a tea, sat at the table and suffered a massive and fatal heart attack. His body hit the table but it was the cup that crashed to the floor. The drinking had finally done for him. In her memoirs she romantically wrote "I crouched down and took you up in my arms, dead. No life, no pulse...my dear, dear friend, gone." Together for 28 years in all but marriage, Hepburn was there truly "in sickness and in health..." loving him to the end - and when you return to the scene where they look at each other at the end of his speech (see below) - and you know this - you realise the acting between these two had stopped long ago - their devotion and respect and love for each other was real.
Guess Whose Coming To Dinner is a movie you should own or return to soon. A reminder of when Hollywood genuinely touched you while occasionally touching on the real issues that affect us all to this day. (The title is dialogue between Tracy and his priest about race in the USA, Tracy first, then the priest).
Let's finish with the words of the Mighty Spence before he looks at Katherine Hepburn:
"...Because in the final analysis, it doesn't matter what we think of them. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel it for each other - and if it's half of what we felt - that's everything!"
Description of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (40th Anniversary Edition)
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn (who won the Academy AwardŽ for Best Actress for her performance) are unforgettable as perplexed parents in this landmark 1967 movie about mixed marriage. Joanna (Katharine Houghton), the beautiful daughter of crusading publisher Matthew Drayton (Tracy) and his patrician wife Christina (Hepburn), returns home with her new fiance John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), a distinguished black doctor. Christina accepts her daughter's decision to marry John, but Matthew is shocked by this interracial union; the doctor's parents are equally dismayed. Both families must sit down face to face and examine each other's level of intolerance. In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,director Stanley Kramer has created a masterful study of society's prejudices.Spencer Tracy's last performance was in this well-meaning, handsome film by Stanley Kramer about a pair of white parents (Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) trying to make sense of their daughter's impending marriage to an African American doctor (Sidney Poitier). The film has been knocked over the years for padding conflict and stoking easy liberalism by making Poitier's character in every socioeconomic sense a good catch: But what if Kramer had made this stranger a factory worker? Would the audience still find it as easy to accept a mixed-race relationship? But there's no denying the drawing power of this movie, which gets most of its integrity from the stirring performances of Tracy and Hepburn. When the former (who had been so ill that the production could not get completion insurance) gives a speech toward the end about race, love, and much else, it's impossible not to be affected by the last great moment in a great actor's life and career. --Tom Keogh
Spencer Tracy's last performance was in this well-meaning, handsome film by Stanley Kramer about a pair of white parents (Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) trying to make sense of their daughter's impending marriage to an African American doctor (Sidney Poitier). The film has been knocked over the years for padding conflict and stoking easy liberalism by making Poitier's character in every socioeconomic sense a good catch: But what if Kramer had made this stranger a factory worker? Would the audience still find it as easy to accept a mixed-race relationship? But there's no denying the drawing power of this movie, which gets most of its integrity from the stirring performances of Tracy and Hepburn. When the former (who had been so ill that the production could not get completion insurance) gives a speech toward the end about race, love, and much else, it's impossible not to be affected by the last great moment in a great actor's life and career. --Tom Keogh
Bestsellers in DVD
![The Story of Jeremiah [VHS] Image](/images/noimg.gif)
The Story of Jeremiah [VHS]Vision Video; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Wresting With God [VHS]by Vision Video
Vision Video; Published: 1990-10-01; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Price in other shops:
Study Bible Video with Workbook [VHS]Spring Arbor Distributors; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $7.95
Price in other shops:
Tempo:Childrens TV Favourites Video [VHS]HarperCollins Audio; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $9.17
Price in other shops:
Tempo.Herbs:Parseley'Sb/ Party Video [VHS]HarperCollins Audio; VHS Tape; VHS Video
![Strike the Original Match [VHS] Image](/images/Strike-the-Original-Match-VHS-0001374079-X.jpg)
Strike the Original Match [VHS]New Liberty Films; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Price in other shops:
![Medjugorje The Miracles and the Message [VHS] Image](/images/Medjugorje-The-Miracles-and-the-Message-VHS-0001373293-X.jpg)
Medjugorje The Miracles and the Message [VHS]JPN Film Production; Release date: 1995-12-15; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $29.99
Mayo Clinic Echocardiography Review Course for Boards and Recertification DVD 2008by Mayo
DVD
Price in other shops:
Pediatric Diagnostic Imaging DVD: Single Userby Oakstone
DVD
Price in other shops:
Cost Accounting [VHS]by Charles T. Horngren, George Foster, Srikant M. Datar, Howard Teall
Pearson Canada, Toronto; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Similar DVDs, VHS Video, Audio CDs
Father of the Bride (Keepcase)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2006-08-29; DVD
Best price: $5.11
Price in other shops:
Uptown Saturday NightWarner Brothers; Release date: 2004-01-13; DVD
Best price: $6.88
Price in other shops:
The Sidney Poitier Collection (Edge of the City / Something of Value / A Patch of Blue / A Warm December)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2009-01-27; DVD
Best price: $16.99
Price in other shops:
A Patch of BlueRelease date: 2003-02-04; DVD
Best price: $22.78
They Call Me Mister Tibbs!POITIER,SIDNEY; Release date: 2001-01-09; DVD
Best price: $3.49
Price in other shops:
For Love of IvyMGM; Release date: 2004-01-20; DVD
Best price: $3.31
Price in other shops:
A Raisin in the SunPOITIER,SIDNEY; Release date: 2000-02-22; DVD
Best price: $6.82
Price in other shops:
In the Heat of the Night (40th Anniversary Collector's Edition)TCFHE/MGM; Release date: 2008-01-15; DVD
Best price: $7.17
Price in other shops:
Lilies of the FieldSony; Release date: 2001-03-06; DVD
Best price: $6.51
Price in other shops:
To Sir, With LoveSony Pictures; Release date: 2000-02-01; DVD
Best price: $6.71
Price in other shops: