Review of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) by Allen B — 10 Apr 2011

Preachy but well written film with a slow, thoughtful pace and a great performance from Katherine Hepburn, despite her occasional mugging for the camera. The film is outdated, though, and gets really hammy at the end with a completely unnecessary speech that spells the theme out for you in big bold capital letters in case you had missed it in the previous hour and a half.

Still, the film is structurally very tight, and it's intelligently written, if not too much on the nose. There's no subtlety here; it's more a message than a film, really, an important one, granted, but one that could have been delivered more effectively had it not been so direct, if the writer and director's first goal was to entertain rather than to educate.

And again, Katherine Hepburn is great, but there are moments where it feels like she's winking at the camera in an "oh my isn't this all very clever" fashion. She even looks at the camera and literally winks at one point, I think, or maybe I imagined it, but the director really ought to have controlled her better. It really took me out of it.

Overall, yeah, good movie, probably an important one for its time. Today, not so much. It's a good movie, sure, but probably too slow for most people to truly enjoy.