Isn't it somewhat condescending the way the movie (in effect) has all the main characters waiting for Drayton (Spencer Tracy), the rich white guy, to tell them what they should think? Even Mr. and Mrs. Prentice are portrayed as needing the white man's wisdom in this situation.
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Most of the time, I'm just trying to be funny.
No. He's the girls father. He asked his permission. Of course he is waiting his response.
sharevery condescending i think. I actually find this film quite uncomfortable to watch.
shareMr. Spencer is a stand in for America. His tortured decision making reflects white americans. All were looking for his reaction, white, male, influential. Would he give permission? It's what the country was being asked vicariously thru these characters. It was an untidy truth then that it was WHITES who put up roadblocks and only they who could remove them.
shareOf course the rich white guy, Drayton, is a San Francisco liberal with a photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his desk. Amusing since S.F.'s three newspapers were not all that liberal in the late 1960s.
shareWell, his character has to be liberal and have had a lifetime of fighting for those causes.
Otherwise, the film doesn't make any sense.
As Mrs. Drayton tells Mr. Drayton, this is what they've stood for, fought for civil rights and they have stood for equality--and now the issue has come into their own living room and therefore, that's why there's a movie at all.
They are forced to self-examine to see if they put their money where where mouth is, so to speak.
Did they really believe in civil rights and equality--as Mrs. Drayton said to her husband--but only so long as your daughter doesn't marry a man who isn't white?
It's just an interesting premise for a film--long-life liberal fighters having to face whether or not they really meant it.
That is true. One of their causes came home.
For me, the Drayton character played by Tracy was an extension of the Drummond character from "Inherit the Wind". I like and respect that character apparently so did Stanley Kramer.
A product of its time. Feminism (legal and social recognition of women as whole, autonomous people with full rights) largely went into hibernation after the suffrage movement, while America dealt with depression, WW2, and its after-affects. It resurged when women were pushed out of the factories they'd kept going for war production, and back to Kinder, Küche, Kirche status.
But that kind of movement takes years, sometimes decades, to really penetrate a culture. The "man of the house" mentality was in full swing until just about this time, when enough attention was paid to all equality causes to finally make a dent. And of course Hollywood is always a bit behind the curve.
Some percentage of the audience would have seen this with more enlightened eyes, but most wouldn't even have questioned it. Now it's pretty much the opposite.
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Nothing to see here, move along.
Walt-Most, I very much agree with you. Here is what I wrote eight years ago on another post:
"I did not like this speech as written: I considered it condescending in the extreme. The film was meant to be somehow "progressive", in that it endorsed love over social convention (and wrongheaded social convention at that, but an extremely long-standing and powerful one). However, if you listen to Tracy's speech, it takes an extremely white-male perspective on matters (and I am saying this as a white male), essentially saying, inter-racial marriage is okay because the white "massuh" approved it. To be honest, I have problems with the entire script and story-line: the plot is incredibly artificial (we have one day to decide about our lives, for no particular reason other than a plane schedule and the need to create the dramatic tension that allow for "meaningful" speechifying, which is not genuine drama). So the characters go about chattering back and forth all day long, with no real advancement of the plot or their positions. The only person that seems to have a genuine and reasonable position is Sydney Poitier's mother. Finally, out of the blue and for no particular reason, Spencer Tracy adopts her position as his own (insulting her in the process, but suggesting she could not be more wrong for criticizing the position he had held until that moment and then suddenly and inexplicably changed - oh, that means she had been RIGHT). So the upshot seems to be that they all talk back and forth toward no purpose, but the key turn in the plot is when Big Daddy makes his decision, announces it to the rest, and decides the issue. I'm sorry, but that was hardly a clarion call for racial and gender equality."