In what seems like a strategic attempt to “win over” white mainstream audiences, and spread a perhaps well-intended message, the creators of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” attempt to create what they feel is the most perfect and like-able black person imaginable, which is to do nothing other than make him exactly like a white person. In every way imaginable, other than his physical appearance, it feels as though Poitier was told to act as white as possible for his role as Dr. Prentice. As Perrin points out in her essay “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: The Web of Racial, Class, and Gender Constructions in late 1960s America,” Dr. Prentice’s idealized cookie-cutter character is not only unrealistically “superhuman” in his academic accomplishments in addition to his upper-class social status, but he is additionally stripped entirely of any actual life experience, memory or context that would have belonged to any black individual actually living during this time, and would have made his character into a (more) complete and believable human being. It is not Dr. Prentice’s blackness but rather his complete lack of a personality, complexity or whole-ness that made his character (at least for me) seem so strange and unable to empathize with emotionally. Throughout the film, Dr. Prentice is not so much a real person as he is a hypothetical idea of a situation that is disconnected from reality entirely (which is ultimately what the entire movie is.)
It is interesting that Dr. Prentice’s excessively superhuman qualities as well as his completely white-washed demeanor and overall character, is both what is necessary for Dr. Prentice to win over Mr. and Mrs. Drayton in the first place, as well as, it seems, what the filmmakers feel is necessary to win over white audiences, and “sell” them the idea of Dr. Prentice and interracial marriage. It is ironic that in their desperate attempts to show to everyone how racist they aren’t, that both the characters and the filmmakers end up revealing how racist they (or at least their tendencies) actually are, though it is a less overt form of it. Through this film, a perhaps well-intended attempt to spread a liberal message of integration, the (white liberal) filmmakers attempt to critique the film’s white liberal characters for hypocrisy, but in doing so through, actually reveal their own.
American Cinema 