Tuning into Guess Who's Coming to Dinner where there should have been football was a lucky break. This is a tightly scripted masterpiece. So many great but innocuous lines have been echoing around my head ever since, such as Spencer Tracy's drink order above. Only wet winter afternoons suit old movie watching, and that's why I'm looking for a place in the Shetlands.
Some notes:
- Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn live in a ludicrously positioned San Francisco house. They have a clear view of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, which as far as I can tell means the house floats in a cloud about 500 metres above the highest point in the city. Even though it's a set, I want it to be real.
- There is no question mark in the film's title. I will have to learn to live with this.
- Sidney Poitier knew how to wear a suit and own every scene he's ever been in.
- At the time of shooting marriage between the races was illegal in 16 states, according to Sidney Poitier's fictional dad.
- The most shocking part for me was the daughter calling a busybody a bitch.
- In 1967 San Francisco the butcher will deliver just four steaks to your house.
- In 1967 San Francisco the butcher's delivery boy dances on your doorstep to no music. Far out daddy-o.
- When Spencer Tracy reverses and crashes his car into another car, he appeases the angry driver with $50 cash, which is $20 more than the guy reckons it'll take to fix.
- Spencer Tracy was in very poor health throughout filming, although you'd never know it. He died 17 days after the film wrapped.
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