The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941) on Netflix
Invited to dine with the Stanleys of Mesalia, Ohio, radio host Sheridan Whiteside slips on their icy steps and moves in to recover. His assistant, Maggie Cutler, falls for a newspaperman.
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- IMDb7.5/109,909 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
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Plot summary
On a cross-country lecture tour, acerbic New York radio personality Sheridan Whiteside stops in the small town of Mesalia, Ohio, to dine with the prominent Stanley family as a publicity stunt. He slips on their icy front steps, injures his hip and insists on spending the Christmas holidays recuperating in their house. Rather than face a threatened $150,000 lawsuit, the Stanleys agree. Installed, Whiteside takes the best rooms, sends his hosts upstairs, telephones Winston Churchill and Haile Selassie, and receives live penguins and an octopus from naturalist admirers. His nurse quits. He urges Richard and June Stanley toward lives their conventional father opposes. Meanwhile his assistant, Maggie Cutler, grows close to local newspaperman Bert Jefferson, who reads her his play, and she decides to leave Whiteside's employ and marry him.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Four leading characters were drawn from real people: Sheridan Whiteside from critic Alexander Woollcott, who later played the role on stage; Lorraine Sheldon from stage actress Gertrude Lawrence; Beverly Carlton from playwright Noël Coward; and Banjo from Harpo Marx of the Algonquin Round Table.
- John Barrymore tested for the role of Sheridan Whiteside after Bette Davis urged Jack L. Warner to buy the screen rights for the two of them, but he was deemed unsuitable: his heavy drinking, or perhaps Alzheimer's, left him struggling with the complicated, fast-paced dialogue even with his lines posted on cue cards.
- Charles Laughton and Orson Welles both campaigned for the role of Sheridan Whiteside, and Laird Cregar and Robert Benchley made screen tests, but producer Hal B. Wallis passed on them all. Jack L. Warner suggested Cary Grant, whom Wallis thought too young and attractive, and the part went to Broadway's Monty Woolley, despite Warner's fear that Woolley's homosexuality would be obvious on screen.
