All this movie is is a group of characters that either approve of the mixed marriage or disapprove of the mixed marriage. That's all it is. One character after another is trotted out and usually in a matter of minutes we know where they stand. And either Katherine Hepburn rejoices or rips them a new one. Worthless.
There is no "off" position on the genius switch.
I agree
shareObviously you didn't get the point of this film, did you? It wasn't so much that they disapproved of mixed marriage, but the thought of how society saw it. None of the people were racist so much as they were a product of their time. I mean, what else did you expect from a movie that was dealing with a very controversial topic of its time?
You love me more than sunny summer days.
I've watched this a number of times and there are only 2 characters that I would call racist. (The cabbie doesn't count, too short of a scene.)
Hilary St. George who would never think she was racists and certainly wouldn't use language typical of what we think a racist would use. He body language, tone and the way she words what she says about the situation make it clear that she is a racist at heart. Christina saw right through her, she probably knew or suspected long before that, and took her out. (I grew up knowing Virginia Christine as Mrs. Olsen, the kindly Folgers Coffee lady. When I first saw her in this I was shocked by her character.)
Tillie, played by the wonderful Isabel Sanford. Tillie is old school and to me her attitudes about black mixing with white is as outdated as some of the others. Her rant to Dr. Prentiss was epic and I think truthful for a person in that position at that time.
The characters are very formulaic but that's true about most of the movies made then and even today.
One of the reasons this film was so important and did so well at the time was because of its squeaky-clean, simplistic approach to the subject matter.
It was criticized then, and certainly since, for being so sanitized. But most Americans -- black and white -- saw interracial romance, let alone marriage, as being something completely off the charts in the mid-'60s (it was still illegal in many places). So doing such "threatening" material in such an unthreatening way was probably why it worked as well as it did or could, given the standards of the time.
If they'd done the film in an edgier way, Hollywood wouldn't have greenlighted the project, and the audience who saw it would have either already agreed the film's message or turned even more against it.
That said, I kind of like the film. Yes, it's largely bullsh!t. But it's late-'60s media bullsh!t: nostalgia in the face of cultural upheaval and change. And that's always been kind of nostalgic in itself.
And Poitier is, in retrospect, a little tough on his dad.
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LBJ's mistress tells all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPdviZbk-XI&;
Well maybe a little harsh on the gratitude front but he was making an important point. His father wanted him to just go along and be like him to have a much lower bar to reach for. Higher than his own but still low enough for a "coloured man" while the son wanted reach good for any man.
sharePoitier isn't tough on his Dad. The important message there is :" You see yourself as a black man, I see mylsef as a man."
I think the father was tough on his son, not the other way round.
What you said in the rest of your post, I fully agree.
Well this was 1967 and a landmark film for the time. Remember that all the Frankie Avalon / Annette Funicello (RIP our adorable Annette) "beach" movies were in part Hollywood’s response to the witch-hunts of Joseph McCarthy. All things considered, I think they had to "sugar-coat" things and add lots of humor in this movie just to get it made.
I think it was important that John be a "blue-black Superman" and that Joey be an "educated, blue-eyed blonde" so that we could dispense with all the usual stereotype reasons race-mixing is frowned upon and address the primal issue: "Is there something intrinsically wrong with inter-marriage?" Remember it would still be a year before first interracial kiss (Star Trek, Kirk & Uhura kiss) on television.
I mean if these two could be accepted as a couple then perhaps tolerance might ease some of the civil unrest of the 1960's. As a result, the world did not end, mixed-couples have become common-place, miscegenation will not be the cause man's extinction and we have come to see that the average gay person is not "choosing" to be gay.
Just my humble opinion almost 50 years in retrospect.
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I'm guessing you are not old enough to have lived through the 60's and specifically the midterm of the civil rights movement. If you had you would have seen yourself in the movie, no matter which race you belong to, and been forced to remember your own thoughts on the subject of mixed race marriages (or dating or cohabitation etc.). That is the stronger point of this movie.
Now that the young adults of that era are older parents (or grandparents) today we can further identify with the parents in the movie as to how they wrestled with their own thoughts once they realized their children's happiness were on the line.