“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” has retained a central and deeply complex position in the culture. Its title remains a catchphrase; its narrative informed Jordan Peele’s movie “Get Out,” a film that feels very much in conversation with its predecessor....“Anybody who’s ever been involved in an interracial marriage of any sort, or even a gay relationship, any kind of relationship that’s not approved of, that movie became a metaphor for those kinds of situations,” Katharine Houghton told King....It’s still a story for white people, because the fear in the narrative mostly belongs to Joanne’s empathetic parents, stand-ins for the audience. Therein lies what makes “Get Out” such a fascinating and crucial piece of revisionism. It featured the same scenario — a young, upper-middle-class white woman brings home an African-American boyfriend to meet her parents — but the fear and tension that motivates the story does not reside in the older white generation. It is felt by the black guy coming to the house with his white girlfriend, entering partly into the unknown and partly into hundreds of years of agonizing history.

Entertainment, I think, is the key word here. Kramer has taken a controversial subject (interracial marriage) and insulated it with every trick in the Hollywood bag. There are glamorous star performances by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made more poignant by his death. There is shameless schmaltz (the title song, so help me, advises folks to give a little, take a little, let your poor heart break a little, etc.). The minor roles are filled with crashing stereotypes, like a Negro maid who must be Rochester's sister and an Irish monsignor with a brogue so fey and eyes so twinkling he makes Bing Crosby look like a Protestant....It is easy to ridicule this deadline as contrived and artificial: and it is easy to argue that Poitier's character is too perfect to be convincing. But neither of these aspects bothered me. The artificial deadline is a convention of drawing room comedies. It provides automatic suspense and keeps the action within a short span of time. And Poitier's "perfect Negro" is no more perfect than Miss Houghton's perfect liberal daughter, Miss Hepburn's perfect Rock of Gibraltar mother and Tracy's perfect Spencer Tracy.

If one were taking this cheerful disquisition on the problems of mixed marriage seriously, there are several observations and pointed questions that would have to be raised. Is this a normal conjunction of a white girl and a Negro man that Stanley Kramer, the producer-director and his scriptwriter, William Rose, have arranged? Is the poison of bigotry and bias conceivable in the attitudes of intelligent, liberal parents towards their daughter when she wants to wed a brilliant, charming Negro who is a candidate for a Nobel Prize? Is a sudden, powerful romance likely between an eminent man of this sort and the starry-eyed college senior Miss Houghton rapturously plays? Let's not pursue those questions, for they will only tend to disturb the euphoria and likely enjoyment of this witty and glistening film. Mr. Rose has written a deliciously swift and pithy script, and Mr. Kramer has made it spin brightly in a stylish ambience of social comedy. Mr. Tracy and Miss Hepburn are superior—he the crusty, sardonic old boy who speaks from a store of flinty wisdom but whose heart overflows with tender love; and she the seemingly airy patrician whose eyes often well with compassionate tears. Mr. Poitier is also splendid within the strictures of a rather stuffy type that might also be questioned, if one were dissecting this film, and Beah Richards is deeply touching as his mother, which is the most profound and dignified role. Isabelle Sanford gets off some nifties, in a somewhat Dick Gregoryish vein, as the family's Negro maid who has the strongest bias against mixed marriages. "Civil rights is one thing but this here is something else," she sniffs in a burst of incisive recognition that might also characterize the blue-chip film. One might add that it has the further value of strong personal sentiment, in that it offers Mr. Tracy so graciously in the last role he played before his death.

Problem: how to tell an interracial love story in a literate, non-sensational and balanced way. Solution: make it a drama with comedy. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is an outstanding Stanley Kramer production, superior in almost every imaginable way, which examines its subject matter with perception, depth, insight, humor and feeling. Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn head a perfect cast. A landmark in its tasteful introduction of sensitive material to the screen, the Columbia release can look to torrid b.o. response throughout a long-legged theatrical release.