GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER

For this blog posting, I decided to look up the film that our professor mentioned in class, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." I became interested in researching the film because I wanted to see how it related to "Night of the Living Dead." This film is about a young "liberal" woman who lives in San Francisco and is dating an African American man. Her fiance, Dr. Prentice, is a highly educated and successful man and is feeling uneasy about meeting the parents. Throughout the movie, the blatant racism is very visible. The fact that they feel the need to "prep" each other on the issue of his color, before getting to her parents house shows that there is a "problem." One thing that really stood out to me in this film is the creation of the African American character, Dr. Prentice. I could not help but question if the reason that they made his character a picture perfect man was so that the audience could only focus on the fact that he was African American. Maybe they made his character like that to try to create the "problem" that this young white woman found the perfect man, except for the fact that he is African American. (At least that is how her parents initially see it).

Like "Night of the Living Dead," this film was also one of the first films to cast an African American man as a leading role. This film has also been named as one of the first films to portray on screen an interracial couple. Both films were released during the 1960s. Although this film was not categorized as a horror film, it played a major role in displaying some of the social fears in America during the 1960s. I believe that this film addresses an underlying fear that the viewers daughter or family member can bring an African American spouse home. The idea of having/supporting an interracial family was terrifying to a lot of people in suburbia America, similar to the way "Night of the Living Dead" did.