Guess Who's Coming To Dinner Versus Adam's Rib

The race issue in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner is obviously what everyone focuses on, and probably what the film intends to focus on. However, there is another interesting relationship going on, aside from the interaction of the races: the interaction of Katherine and Spencer.

Their performances in the film are infused with extracinematic text: their decades long affair (he was married, but Catholic, so refused to divorce his wife), previous collaborations, his death soon after (Guess is the last film he did), and infamous uninsurability (due to his rampant alcoholism, fueled in part by his affair) -- to name a few.

But most of all, their relationship in the film reminded me of one of their earliest -- and arguably best (known) -- collaborations: Adam's Rib. Indeed, the films are similar overall: though one deals with race rights, the other women's rights (albeit not as overtly). The basic plot is this: Katherine and Spencer played a married couple, both lawyers. Spencer gets a case to represent a cheating husband whose wife shot him upon discovering his infidelity. Katherine, siding with the woman, then chooses to represent her, and chaos ensues.

Katherine's character turns the suit into a feminist issue: women are mistreated by men (the husband cheated on his wife) and so deserve whatever retribution they may get. The film ends significantly, with Spencer pretending he is about to shoot Katherine, in order to get her to see that it is never alright for anyone to attack anyone, regardless of feminist etc. motivations that may be read into the act.

Alright, so how does this movie relate to Guess? Aside from the similarities in their star partnering and social problem film tendencies, the films cast Katherine and Spencer in similar lights. In both, Katherine is the raging liberal, who is on the side of the minority at the time whatever that side may be. Spencer is, as always, the more level-headed one, actually considering issues rationally rather than ideologically.

This distinction is particularly interesting considering their personal histories. Katherine was only married once, for six years, when she was very very young, and before she got famous. So for the whole of her career, she was a single woman -- not so interesting now, but considering the decades she worked during ... What's certainly more radical is her ability to have a decades long affair with a married man, and broadcast that indiscretion time and time again with their undeniable screen chemistry.

Furthermore, Katherine put up with Spencer's alcoholism -- she was the one to pick him up after his lost weekends. So while she may have followed the traditional trajectory of committing herself to one man for a multitude of years, their partnership appears nothing if not untraditional: unmarried, without children, he an alcoholic ...

And as for Spencer, while clearly somewhat lax with his values, he is also obviouly conservative. His Catholic guilt forbade him from ever divorcing his wife for a woman he clearly loved, and drove him to drink.

I am not aware of how well known their stories were at the time, so I cannot speak to whether Guess and Adam's were working with Katherine and Spencer's personaes (which obviously may well have been influnced by their personal lives in any case), but it is interesting to note this overlap. What's also interesting is to note how the films do follow the trajectory of rights in America.

Black people got the right to vote before women -- they after the civil war, women in 1920. This African American rights was indeed limited until the 1960's, but still existed in a technical sense at least. Obama became president before a woman. The list of instances goes on. So why, then, if this is the order in which the nation deals out freedoms, do America's films deal with the issues in reverse order? Indeed, the amount of gender relations films in the '30s and '40s as compared to race relations in the '50s and '60s is astounding. Perhaps it is just that gender issues work better in the romantic comedy mode so perfected in the early decades. But is there also something more at work here?