MovieChat Forums > Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) Discussion > Katherine Houghton Thought Joanna was a ...

Katherine Houghton Thought Joanna was a Ninny Too

posted 13 years ago by PretoriaDZ
3 replies | jump to latest

Katherine has said that she did not like the way Kramer wanted her to play Joanna, all wide-eyed and unaware and that she too could not see how Poitier's character could become interested in a person with so little experience, even if she was pretty. If the character of John was a world traveler, as depicted, he would have met many women of all colors who would have had greater intellect and as goodlooking or better and who would not have been hobbled by race prejudice (since, in a lot of other countries, interracial marriage was not an issue.) And as a goodlooking, famous doctor, John (Sidney) was a catch.

The only thing I can figure, as another poster proposed, is that Kramer did not want the Joanna character to become involved in the dispute, so her joyful, blitheful attitude was the only way to keep the character from becoming involved. If you want, just imagine that John was hot for her and dazed at her total lack of seeing any problem with their falling in love.

Give Miss Houghton credit for taking the part. She received a lot of death threats for it.

[–] Tobey 12 years ago

I've never gotten the impression that Joanna didn't have a keen intellect. She just seems to me to be a young woman who's caught up in the madness of a whirlwind romance. She's only recently out of college, which would make her early twenties.
John is very well educated and world travelled but he was also raised in the US so he knows what's going on. It would be interesting to find out how far into their 10 day courtship they found out about each others background.

[–] dwhw 12 years ago

I agree with the first poster in this thread, in that the character Katharine Houghton plays comes across as something of a vapid simp. However, I'm also glad to know that Houghton disliked the way that Stanley Kramer insisted she play that character. In this case, I think it's unfortunate that the director had the final say.

That said, it's of course all too easy to throw brickbats at a movie that's 45 years old. Maybe America wouldn't have been ready for it, but I believe the film would have been much better if certain other circumstances had been changed, of which I'll list only two here:

1. It would have been more interesting if Houghton's family had been knocked down a few pegs in their socio-economic standing, instead of having Spencer Tracy's character being a well-heeled, big-city newspaper publisher.

2. It also would have been more interesting if Sidney Poitier's character hadn't been another Dr. Ralph Bunche in-the-making, and had had a few character flaws of his own.

Responses are more than welcome.

Im Arme der Götter wuchs ich groß.--Friedrich Hölderlin

[–] UdoConstantini (117) 4 years ago

I got the impression that they simply fell in love. John was not looking for a wife; he just found one without looking. Love knows no rhyme or reason. If John were thinking purely in terms of a sensible match, he would have avoided a white woman altogether for all the reasons the film highlights. But the point was that they were in love.

Re: kudos to Ms. Houghton for taking on the controversial role. A decade earlier Joan Fontaine played Harry Belafonte's love interest in, Island in the Sun, a mostly forgettable film (other than the stellar cast, which also included James Mason, Dorothy Dandridge, Joan Collins and Michael Rennie). I'm not sure about death threats, but I read she received plenty of hate mail.