ABSTRACT
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner tells the story of an upper-class, white husband and wife, who at first disapprove of their daughter’s intention to marry a black man but later come to embrace the idea. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a popular success when it was released, grossing between seventy and eighty million dollars and winning two of the ten Academy Awards for which it was nominated. Thomas Cripps cites Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as merely one in a line of films that signaled the decline of Sidney Poitier’s career and that demonstrated “the exhaustion by 1968 of the genre and the ennui of its audience.” Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was an intervention in the highly charged debate about the civil rights movement’s successes and failures. A problem with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, internal to the liberal political orientation it champions, is that it understands racism as an effect of the prejudices of individual social actors.
