Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Historical Significance

Significant in social history, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner takes place in 1967 and appeared in theaters December 12, 1967, just six months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on June 12, 1967, that state bans on interracial marriages are unconstitutional.

Important in film history, the film challenges the racial stereotypes of black men as hypersexual and dangerous that were codified in D. W. Griffith's influential film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Kramer revised Griffith's story to counter old ideas with new ones. Like Griffith's black villains Gus and Silas Lynch, John Prentice wants to marry a white woman. But where Griffith's characters won't take no for an answer, John asks Joanna's parents to approve, and she loves him. Unlike Griffith's villains, John is restrained. He tells his mother he wants Joanna desperately, but he does not have premarital sex and he is not just after her because of her race. In fact, he was previously married to a black woman and had a son, but both died in an accident. It is also noted in the film that he is attracted to black women, including Dorothy, a Drayton employee. Akin to Silas Lynch, who rises from slavery to become a Lieutenant Governor, John is the son of a retired mailman and rises to Assistant Director of the World Health Organization. But whereas Lynch wants to disenfranchise whites, John wants to help Africans practice medicine in Africa. Unlike Griffith's villains, John is no threat to anyone.

Both films test white liberalism. In Griffith's film, Austin Stoneman, a white statesman who helps Silas Lynch rise to power, is tested when Lynch announces he wants to marry Stoneman's daughter. Stoneman adamantly refuses. In Kramer's film, Matt Drayton is a newspaper owner known as “a fighting liberal” against racial discrimination. Matt's liberalism is tested, but by film's end he champions his daughter's marriage and becomes a new cinematic role model for white fathers.

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