Stanley Kramer
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Get Out (2017)
Directed by Jordan Peele
influenced by Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Plot Themes
Get Out takes the initial premise of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and then twists it with The Stepford Wives to create a compelling, thoughtful critique of white power.
That is part of Get Out ’s problem and the joy of the film: the work is its own “thinkpiece,” while borrowing genre notes from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , The Stepford Wives, and Being John Malkovich .
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” meets “The Stepford Wives” in “ Get Out ,” in which a white girl brings her black boyfriend home to meet her parents, whose superficially warm welcome masks an unthinkably dark secret.
Suffice it to say that Peele has created his own horror-fied version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that fearlessly goes for broke in a third act that ratchets up the insanity of Chris’ predicament.
A popular reference I’ve seen pointed out is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), though I would update its mention by acknowledging The Dinner Game (1998) in the same breath.
It certainly takes cues from cinematic history, and could be elevator pitched as "The Stepford Wives meets Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," but with a playful sense of tone, amazing performances, and a sharp bite, it resonates with you long after you've left the theater.
A cut from Elwood in the back of the car that brings him to the academy to a clip of Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in a similar setting at the beginning of The Defiant Ones, for instance, suggests a bit of psychic recall: a character drawing from his own pop-cultural frame of reference as a way of coping with his own horrific circumstance.
And while “Nickel Boys” is mercifully far too experiential and self-possessed to end with a series of sobering title cards about the history it depicts, there's a palpable sense of implication in the recurring use of film clips (Stanley Kramer's “The Defiant Ones” is a major point of reference) and news footage, which serve as damning reminders of culture's selective myopia.
Ross repeatedly references scenes from Stanley Kramer's classic The Defiant Ones (1958), wherein prisoner Sidney Poitier is changed to the racist Tony Curtis as they flee authorities, eventually bonding over the experience.
Still, I am hard-pressed to think of a film that uses footage from another movie as thoughtfully or as powerfully as Nickel Boys uses moments from The Defiant Ones, Stanley Kramer's film about two prisoners (played by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier) who escape from their incarceration in shackles and must learn to work together, despite their differences.-Dissertations will surely be written about the camerawork in this movie, not just for its POV but for its choices of specific angles, particularly its repeated motif of images looking directly up at the sky, or, in the shot that has become the film's main poster, up to a mirrored ceiling reflecting the two protagonists back at themselves.
Ross additionally intercuts other forms of media, like videos that appear to be taken straight from YouTube as well as scenes from other films, like the 1958 Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier movie "The Defiant Ones."
Even beyond the canon of films that valorize the Confederacy and the Old South, movies have white heroes with whom audiences can identify: Robert Shaw in Glory, Skeeter in The Help, Agents Ward and Anderson in Mississippi Burning—even Tony Curtis' Joker, who begrudgingly comes to respect fellow chain gang prisoner Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) in The Defiant Ones, a movie Elwood watched at Nickel.
Our fears showed up in the movies, too, in Cold War dramas like Sidney Lumet’s 1964 Fail Safe or apocalyptic thrillers like Stanley Kramer’s 1959 On the Beach.
Ditto the not-made-for-TV When the Wind Blows, The Quiet Earth, and On the Beach.
Nevil Shute’s On the Beach was made into a sombre film by Stanley Kramer in 1959…
Stanley Kramer’s 1959 On the Beach that ended with the last gasp of humanity in an empty Australian town after the nuclear fallout has passed through…
Green Book (2018)
Directed by Peter Farrelly
influenced by The Defiant Ones (1958), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Characters Themes Plot
At times they remind us of the squabbling runaway convicts in The Defiant Ones (1958).
Similar figures can be identified in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier’s characters go to unreasonable lengths to console and save bigoted white folk, assuring the addressed (white) viewer that no matter how hateful their actions, no matter how unspeakable the history of their country’s racism, the established order will not come under threat.
But its pedigree is slightly different, reaching back through the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies of the 1970s to “The Defiant Ones” in 1958, which starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway convicts in the Jim Crow South.
If you can imagine a mash-up of “Driving Miss Daisy” with “The Defiant Ones,” you’ll have some idea of what “Green Book” is like.
Similar figures can be identified in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier’s characters go to unreasonable lengths to console and save bigoted white folk, assuring the addressed (white) viewer that no matter how hateful their actions, no matter how unspeakable the history of their country’s racism, the established order will not come under threat.
The new movie “Green Book” sets up, with a pristine precision, a scenario that was already ridiculous when it was presented in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” more than half a century ago: the acceptance by white people of a black protagonist whose talents and achievements are exceptional, whose manners are elegant, whose record is spotless, and whose résumé and connections are stamped “high-class.”
But in general, the tone is a throwback to many of the old school kind of thrillers that took larger-than-life concepts and fears, and grounded them in a cynical psychology; films like Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach where most of the world ended in nuclear explosion, yet Australians are forced to quizzically carry on as if nothing happened while radioactive fallout inches closer every passing week.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Directed by Joe Russo
influenced by It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Plot
With a feeling that recalls 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, dozens of famous fighters reunite — Chris Evans’ Captain America , Chris Hemsworth's Thor and Chris Pratt's Star-Lord.
Set in an upscale Swiss spa (and shot on location at the Berghotel Schatzalp, the inspiration for Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"), "Youth" is a kind of landlocked "Ship of Fools" following the interactions of several characters during their stay at the resort.
Sorrentino entrecruza sus historias y reúne a las celebridades a la manera de aquellos dramas sentimentales que el cine hollywoodense solía concentrar en un espacio fastuoso, ya fuera Grand hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) o, con menor glamour, La nave del mal (Ship of fools, Stanley Kramer, 1965), según la novela homónima de Katherine Anne Porter.
Immortan Joe represents the elder white male always at the apex of power structures in society; the lawmaker who is always deciding what’s best for women and what they should do with their bodies; a relic whose political greed is responsible for killing the world – Miller takes heavy cues from Nevil Shute’s On The Beach and Stanley Kramer’s film adaptation when it comes to Earth’s poisoning.
Shrek 2 (2004)
Directed by Conrad Vernon
influenced by Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Plot Themes
Co-writer/co-director Adamson has said it was inspired by "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and there is something of the plodding nature of that film in this one's initial exposition.
Concocting a magical potion -- part "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and part popular culture with sprinkles of pixel dust -- Pacific Data Images/DreamWorks has created one of the year's most entertaining movies.
Over their first evening meal en famille— either Guess Who’s Coming to Dinneror Meet the Parents, depending on when you grew up — King Harold (voiced by a querulous John Cleese ) and Queen Lillian ( Julie Andrews , reprising her regal dignity in The Princess Diaries) try to overcome their shock at their daughter’s altered appearance and her new husband’s table manners.
No less than the butt-ugly, digitally animated version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , Shrek 2 continues its predecessor’s facile race and gender thematics while stubbornly playing to the rabble in the pit.
It worked when Sidney Poitier jumped off the train to save Tony Curtis’ life in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), and Gray is hoping, with all the best intentions and underwritten characterizations, that it will work now.
Examples range from “ The Defiant Ones ” to “ The Help .”
Throughout, echoes of past Hollywood movies (from "Casablanca" to "The Defiant Ones") reverberate.
Second, there is the “Magical Negro,” the Black character teaches Whites compassion, folklore-like lessons and other doses of emotionality (think Hattie McDaniel in Gone With The Wind, Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, or, a recent example, Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty).
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Directed by Sam Raimi
influenced by The Defiant Ones (1958)
Plot
In this film, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” Strange and Mordo will have a “The Defiant Ones” moment (Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier 1958 film).
Crash (2005)
Directed by Paul Haggis
influenced by Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Defiant Ones (1958)
Themes
Despite its stylistic debt to Robert Altman's films, the true inspiration for "Crash" are the liberal "problem" dramas of the late 1950s and early 60s like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Defiant Ones."
For all its daring and intermittent power, Crash seems destined to join other films like Gentleman's Agreement, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, and Grand Canyon among well-intentioned social dramas in which message becomes reality.
Despite its stylistic debt to Robert Altman's films, the true inspiration for "Crash" are the liberal "problem" dramas of the late 1950s and early 60s like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Defiant Ones."
That's just one bit of generational humor that's present in "Why Him?" a comedy that follows in the footsteps -- sort of -- of the parents-meet-boyfriend films ranging from 1967's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" to the more recent "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Meet the Parents."
Cowritten and directed by John Hamburg, who wrote Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, and Little Fockers, Franco's movie gleefully parodies that earlier franchise, along with classics like Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride and Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
We’re not talking about pioneering race-relation dramas like the Sidney Poitier trilogy–The Defiant Ones (1958), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)–which, for good or ill, wrangle directly with their white protagonists’ racial rancor.
Unlike most "civil rights" films, from "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" to "Mississippi Burning," "The Help" doesn't function primarily as a security blanket for white viewers who want to feel good about themselves for not sharing the overtly racist attitudes of the white characters onscreen.
The unlikely pair wind up tethered by a common cause, but Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones they are not.
It’s a tired trope, and has more than a whiff of “The Defiant Ones" (that 1958 movie where a white prisoner is shackled to a black prisoner and they make a run for it).
If so, I�d say you must not have seen Beat the Devil (1953) or The Pride and the Passion (1958) or Blaze (1989).
With its clever, gorgeously textured evocations of everything from early American newsreels to misty, sub-tropical vistas, Up is every bit as ambitious and amazing as Pixar’s animation milestones as it spins its fable about retired balloon-seller and curmudgeonly widower, Carl Frederickson (voiced with gravelly gusto by Ed Asner), who looks the spitting image of the latter-day Spencer Tracy (think Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).