Join us for a 50th anniversary screening of GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER on Wednesday, February 15, at 7:00 PM at the Laemmle Royal in West LA. Q & A after the screening with Karen and Kat Kramer, widow and daughter of producer-director Stanley Kramer. Click here to purchase tickets.
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER was nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1967, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is one of a small number of films to receive Oscar nominations in all four acting categories. Katharine Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Actress, and William Rose also won for his original screenplay. The cast also includes Spencer Tracy (who received his ninth Oscar nomination for his final screen performance), Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton, Beah Richards, and Cecil Kellaway.
The picture made headlines for being one of the few Hollywood movies of the era to center on an interracial love story. The movie completed shooting just a few weeks before the Supreme Court ruled, in Loving v. Virginia, that anti-miscegenation laws still on the books in most Southern states were unconstitutional. So the film foreshadowed this historic decision.
Beyond its social content, however, the film is remembered as the last of nine movies that Hepburn and Tracy made together. Their irresistible chemistry was once again visible in their final collaboration, completed just two weeks before Tracy’s death, and adds considerable poignancy to the film.
Producer-director Stanley Kramer was the man behind such potent dramas as Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind, On the Beach, The Defiant Ones, Ship of Fools, High Noon, and The Wild One. In addition to his many nominations as director and producer, he was awarded the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1961.
Q&A will be moderated by former Los Angeles Film Critics Association president Stephen Farber. Part of our ongoing Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit www.laemmle.com/ac.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_gHO67qzg
Alda also stars in the film, along with Carol Burnett, Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, Rita Moreno, and Bess Armstrong. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote that Alda “succeeds in presenting a gentle, likable, frequently funny glimpse of everyday types doing their everyday best to get by.”
Carol Burnett starred in one of the most popular and beloved television series of all time, The Carol Burnett Show, which ran from 1967 to 1978. She has excelled on stage, on screen, and on television. 
Bess Armstrong made her feature film debut in The Four Seasons after starting out in television. She went on to co-star in High Road to China, Jaws 3-D, Nothing in Common, and the TV series My So-Called Life and House of Lies, among many other credits.
On January 14 the 
THE TURNING POINT tells the story of two friends who started out together as dancers in a national ballet company (modeled on American Ballet Theatre).
Laemmle Theatres and the 
We’ll also soon screen two by Michelangelo Antonioni: 
In The Man Who Knew Too Much one of Doris Day’s rare forays into the thriller genre, the actress introduced one of her most successful songs, the Oscar-winning hit, “Que Sera Sera.” But she also demonstrated her versatility in several harrowing and suspenseful dramatic scenes. She plays the wife of one of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, James Stewart. The movie was a box office bonanza for all parties. Hitchcock’s success during the 1940s allowed the director to employ bigger budgets and shoot on location for several of his Technicolor thrillers in the 1950s, including To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. For The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake of his own 1934 film, Hitchcock traveled to Morocco and to London for some spectacular location scenes. In his famous series of interviews with the Master of Suspense, Francois Truffaut wrote, “In the construction as well as in the rigorous attention to detail, the remake is by far superior to the original.” The plot turns on kidnapping and assassination, all building to a concert scene in the Royal Albert Hall that climaxes memorably with the clash of a pair of cymbals.
We open our sagebrush weekend with the “third and best of Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy… the quintessential spaghetti Western,” according to Leonard Maltin. The trilogy became the most popular of the hundreds of European Westerns made in the 1960s and 70s. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, set during the Civil War in New Mexico, is actually a prequel to A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, all of which starred Clint Eastwood as Blondie, or the Man with No Name. Leone and his screenwriters considered the film a satire with its emphasis on violence and deconstruction of Old West romanticism.
This film won seven Oscars in 1991, including Best Picture and Best Director Kevin Costner. (It was the first Western to be named Best Picture since Cimarron took the prize in 1931.) It remains one of the most popular Western films of all time, with one of the few positive and honest portrayals of Native American culture. And it is a genuine historical epic that deserves to be seen on the big screen, where its spectacular battle scenes and buffalo hunt can be fully appreciated.
The film was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1966, including Best Director and Best Screenplay for Hollywood veteran (and past Oscar winner) Richard Brooks. This irreverent Western boasts plenty of sardonic humor and turns many of the values of the genre upside down, but it does not skimp on production values or striking cinematography (by Oscar winner Conrad Hall). “Taut excitement throughout” was the verdict of Leonard Maltin.
One of the finest collaborations of John Wayne and director John Ford is also one of the most influential and admired Westerns in history. At the time of its release, The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a ripsnorting Western,” but its reputation grew in later years.
We close the weekend with a modern take on the oater genre. This 1961 film’s themes of outsiders and non-conformists misplaced in contemporary society, with no new undiscovered frontiers, provide a fitting elegy to the Western.