It has been difficult to listen and hear about racial unrest in the United States, going from two consecutive incidents of black men being shot to death by police, complete with video coverage, to the horrifying events in Dallas where a former soldier fired on white police officers at a protest rally, killing and wounding several.
The shooting of blacks by white police officers is not particularly new for the U.S. There’s been a lot of this kind of violence going on down there, and the way the broadcast media focuses on these particular shootings makes it very hard to know if it’s as bad as it looks.
Just given the prevalence of shootings in the U.S., it almost seems like every week or every other week another horrifying incident comes to light, but these ones were particularly galvanizing of protests with videos showing what happened — and it really wasn’t very pretty.
Thus I was struck as I watched a favourite old movie, but through the lens of these awful events.
After scrolling through the TV listings one evening, I came across a classic from 1967 with the incomparable Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton in “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?”
For that time period, that must’ve seemed risky and controversial to have Sidney Poitier brought home by a young woman (Houghton, who in real life was Hepburn’s niece) as her future husband.
In the story, Tracy and Hepburn are asked for their blessing on the relationship, with certain pressures applied. One was, Poitier’s character told the couple if they didn’t approve, the marriage wouldn’t happen. Two, the time pressure was immense, as the blessing needed to happen that evening as it developed the daughter was going to fly out with her fiance that very evening so they could be married in Geneva, Switzerland.
The commentaries on this relationship and the mixing of black and white came about from Spencer Tracy, who was the daughter’s crotchety father and a newspaper publisher in San Francisco.
Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen this film, but Tracy does end up giving his blessing in the end — but to me, the interesting parts were all the discussions about the race issue that were made throughout the film.
Seen through the lens of the latest black-white conflicts, like the “Black Lives Matter” movement (and the subsequent “All Lives Matter” movement which somehow got entangled in the Canadian national anthem at the All-Star game for Major League Baseball), the “pigmentation problem” referred to by Spencer Tracy is still ongoing in a major way. There was even a comment by Tracy to Poitier in the film to the effect that this issue will still not be solved 50 years from then. Well, guess what? The movie is 49 years old, so he was being pretty prophetic. The issues are still not resolved.
