WORLD TOUR Day 2 - San Francisco, CA
BEFORE: I know, I've got a whole world to check out, and as of Day 2, the odometer still reads zero miles. I'm still in San Francisco - let's say it's a 2-day layover - because I couldn't pass up the chance to let Sidney Poitier carry over. Turner Classic Movies ran this one a couple weeks ago, and I couldn't pass it up - along with a few other Tracy/Hepburn films.
Besides, I never said we'd be hitting a different city each night - I'll probably spend a week on NYC-based films alone. Don't worry, I'll get to a lot of different places.
THE PLOT: A couple's attitudes are challenged when their daughter brings home a fiancé who is black.
AFTER: I added this film to the list was because of its reputation as a groundbreaking film concerning race relations. But it's a snapshot of race relations in the U.S. in 1967, and some would say we've come a long way since then. Maybe so, maybe not, but I have to judge the film as a person seeing it for the first time in 2012, so I have to wonder whether it's still relevant.
I'm presented with an older couple, the husband owns/runs a newspaper, and the wife owns/runs an art gallery - and they live in San Francisco, so chances are they're liberal, at least by 1967 standards. But though they claim to be progressive, and to have raised their daughter as such, they also employ a black housekeeper. Am I supposed to regard this as a coincidence, or, as I suspect, is this placed in the film to show they're not as liberal as they think? This could go either way, because maybe they're paying the housekeeper really well, and giving her an opportunity. Since they both work, and seem to be doing well, maybe they just don't have time to cook or clean the house.
But then their daughter brings home a black boyfriend (although back then the words "colored" and "Negro" were more common - I'm a little shocked that TCM keeps the outdated language intact) and their liberalism appears to be put to the test. The daughter, though engaged to a black man, doesn't think twice about ordering around the housekeeper, which I found to be a little telling. She seems to have drawn a distinction in her mind between her college-educated fiancé and the hired help.
Let's be real for a second here, because the daughter is a piece of work, even if you put the race issue aside. She brings home a man that she's known for less than two weeks, who she got engaged to, and practically demands that her parents accept the man, before they've even gotten to know him. Then she brings out the fact that the marriage is in like 3 weeks, and oh, yeah, she's moving to Europe for a few months. What the hell happened to "Hi, Mom and Dad, how are you?"
Of course the parents are shocked. Again, putting race aside, any time you bring home someone you care about to meet the parents, it's a delicate situation. The parents want to know about the man who's dating their daughter, and rightfully so, before they consent to anything. But since they're sandbagged here with the urgency of the situation, they're really put on the spot. And on top of that, since the daughter's bragged about how progressive they are, if they raise any objection, they're automatically racist. And on top of THAT, if they raise any objection to the marriage, they'll alienate their own daughter, who's so headstrong she's going to do what she wants anyway.
So, yeah, they're not really given a lot of choice here. I wanted to smack their daughter FOR them, because in addition to playing dirty pool with her parents' approval AND backing them into a corner, she was annoying as all hell. Why the rush to get married? Her argument is, since we're sure about our relationship, we might as well get married right away. Any reasonable parent could turn that argument around and say, if you're sure about the relationship, then you won't mind taking it slow. (Maybe my life would be different if my parents had said that to me when I was 23...)
But it seems no one here can be open and honest with each other, and they all want to skirt around the issue and move into various rooms and have the same conversations over and over. It gets worse when HIS parents fly up for dinner, and then there are more combinations of people who have to go off into separate rooms and have the very same conversations over and over - pretty much wasting two hours of MY time because they can't come out and say what they want to say.
I found it more interesting when the black housekeeper - who was opposed to the marriage for the exact opposite of reasons as everyone else - confronted the younger black man who she thought was being "uppity" by dating a white woman. Even more interesting than THAT was how that actress managed to somehow look younger 8 years later when she starred on "The Jeffersons".
NITPICK POINT: It only costs $30 to repair a smashed car? Damn, I wish I lived in 1967, when everything was super-cheap.
NITPICK POINT #2: Everyone seems to think you can just go to the airport and buy a ticket for a same-day flight. Aren't those the most expensive of all? Who does that? I plan plane trips like six months in advance.
I remember they made a sort of remake of this film, starring Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mac - the twist being that the father was now black, and the boyfriend white. If they really wanted to update the film and make it relevant for today's audience, they'd make the boyfriend Muslim. Or maybe the young couple would be 2 gay men, and neither set of parents would know about their son's orientation at first.
So, I'm left questioning whether this film is still relevant, except as a 1960's curiosity. Forget that, I have to ask whether it's still entertaining, because that's how I rate films - by how entertained I felt at the end. Maybe I would have liked this one a bit more if the characters got out of the house a little more, since it felt too much like a stage-play. Or if the movie had more than one song that was repeated over and over, as the movie's theme, and as both background AND incidental music. That was a bit of overkill.
Didn't see too much of San Francisco tonight, except for the airport and a trip to a drive-in on Mission St. The fake backdrop of the San Francisco bay doesn't count. Movin' on...
Starring Spencer Tracy (last seen in "Pat and Mike"), Katherine Hepburn (ditto), Katherine Houghton (Hepburn's niece, playing her daughter), Isabel Sanford.
RATING: 4 out of 10 ice cream flavors
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