Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-06-07 (Friday)

On 6/8/2024 11:09 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
 

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (4K disc) Slowly working my way through
another Sony Classics box set, and working my way through some Sidney
Poitier movies, I kicked it off this this 1967 drama starring Poitier as
a young man who meets his fiance's parents (Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy in his final role).  The movie was mostly background noise
with a pretty good commentary track full of lots of trivia I didn't
know.  For example the actress who played the fiance was Hepburn's real
life niece.  And while others were probably well aware of this, I think
this was the first I realized (also thanks to the commentary track) the
family maid was played by Isabel Sanford (from the Jeffersons).

 She got a number of good scenes in it and was quite funny. There's a
good story about how she got cast but I've forgotten.
 Poitier, would you believe, was 40 during production. That guy had a
picture of Dorian Gray in his attic.

He must!  I just finished "To Sir, with Love" which came out the same year and was thinking to myself he must have been about 20 something when he made it.

 I really don't like this movie. The Poitier character was too perfect, a
doctor and a great humanitarian and his parents were black intellectuals.

This was discussed extensively on the commentary track.  A lot of critics and civil rights leaders at the time hated the movie with a burning passion because the character was too perfect.  But they said the director was very deliberate in what he was doing and considered the movie more of a fantasy and not meant to be realistic.

It's not like she was marrying a plumber. The racial discussions were
hard to take seriously. The only thing that really worked was the humor
and a little bit of how characters who had taken harder positions had
softened.
 Tracy was quite ill. He was seated most of the time. Hepburn worked with
him on his scenes. He could work only a few hours a day and she made
sure he was ready. Still, what we saw on screen, when Tracy had to give
one of his profound speeches, he was quite powerful. Amazing.
 

Yes.  They talked a lot about that on the commentary.  In particular they discussed the editing which did wonders to hide just how sick Tracy was during filming.  His speech at the end was cobbled together from multiple takes picking and choosing the best line or phrase where his sickness didn't come through.  And the tears in Hepburn's eyes at the end were very real.

He died days after production wrapped.