Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) on Netflix
Joanna Drayton returns to San Francisco from a vacation in Hawaii with the man she plans to marry, Dr. John Prentice. Her liberal parents, Matt and Christina Drayton, learn he is Black.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.8/1053,264 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes71%
Trailer
Plot summary
Joanna Drayton, twenty-three, comes back to her parents' San Francisco house from a vacation in Hawaii with her fiancé, Dr. John Prentice. He is a widower and a doctor, and they became engaged after ten days together. Matt Drayton runs a newspaper; Christina Drayton owns an art gallery. Both are liberal and both are troubled that the man their daughter means to marry is Black. John is due in Geneva for three months of work with the World Health Organization, so the couple's plans depend on the Draytons' answer. Joanna has invited John's parents from Los Angeles to dinner; they do not know that their son's fiancée is white. Monsignor Ryan, a family friend, joins them.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Insurance companies refused to cover Spencer Tracy for the filming because of his failing health, so Stanley Kramer and Katharine Hepburn put their own salaries in escrow to pay for completing the film with another actor if Tracy died during production.
- Sidney Poitier was so starstruck by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy that he forgot his lines, so he asked Stanley Kramer to send the two stars home and played the scene in close-up against two empty chairs while a dialogue coach read their lines off camera.
- To work around Spencer Tracy's failing health, the filming schedule changed so all his scenes were shot between 9:00 am and noon, giving him the rest of the day to rest. In many of his dialogue scenes, a stand-in replaced him during close-ups on other characters.
- Katharine Hepburn pushed to cast her niece Katharine Houghton as Joey Drayton, the daughter of Hepburn's and Tracy's characters, saying the family resemblance made it her idea.
- A line in which Tillie answers "Guess who's coming to dinner now?" with "The Reverend Martin Luther King?" was cut from the film after King's assassination on April 4, 1968, and was missing from almost all theaters by August 1968 before being restored to many prints from 1969.
- The film was one of the first to show an interracial marriage positively at a time when such marriages were still illegal in 17 states, and filming ended shortly before the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia on June 12, 1967.
- Spencer Tracy completed his work on the film just 17 days before his death in June 1967, and Katharine Hepburn, his longtime partner, said she never watched the finished film because it would be too painful.
- The film's script was influenced by two real interracial marriages: Peggy Cripps, an aristocratic British debutante, married Ghanaian anti-colonialist Nana Joe Appiah, and Lloyd's underwriter Ruth Williams married African aristocrat Kgosi Seretse Khama, a union that led to the couple being stripped of their chiefly titles and exiled to Britain before they returned to lead Botswana.
