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James Clive Matthews is the author of two books of film criticism, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and blog editor for the BBC's Pocket Films site. Here he picks five romantic comedy films every home should have. Click to view Top 5 Best Romantic Comedies.
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Most influential (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) |
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 This could equally well have been picked as a top political movie as a top romantic comedy – for it is rare that a film has so serious an impact in the real world. So serious were the times and so serious the message, few when it was made would have thought of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as a comedy. |
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Even today, some might be offended at the very suggestion, lest it make light of the message that people should not be judged by the colour of their skin. But, of course, the traditional definition of a comedy is a story with humour and a happy ending – and as such, this easily qualifies.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was made in 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the year before Martin Luther King’s assassination, and arrived like the proverbial bombshell – at a time when the fight for equal rights for African Americans may have almost been won, yet while attitudes across much of the United States had yet to catch up with the changing times.
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 On Dr King’s assassination, just three months after the film hit cinemas, a joking reference to him was cut and, although it has since been restored to DVD versions, that should give just some indication of the tense times in which this movie was released. In such an atmosphere, to produce a movie about the romance between a nice middle-class white girl and an African American, even one played by the Oscar-winner Sidney Poitier, was an astonishing move for a Hollywood which had traditionally avoided political controversy at all cost. Indeed, as little as six months before the film was released, such an interracial relationship would have been illegal in 17 states – and in many of those would still have been met by a lynch mob.
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Real-life Poignancy |
As the couple at the heart of the film are so deeply in love, they do not fulfil the usual role of couples in romantic comedies – who almost always break up at least once before getting back together at the last minute. Instead, this role goes to Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as the parents of the girl, in what they both knew would be their last screen outing together after 25 years and nine films.
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 The ultimate Hollywood screen couple, they were also a couple in real life - and the poignancy of both knowing that Tracy was on the edge of death reverberates throughout the film as their characters battle with their consciences and think back over their long relationship. Tracy died just 17 days after the shoot finished. It is a testament to the film’s success, as a part of the wider Civil Rights Movement, that today is possible to read Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as a comedy pure and simple. There may well be ongoing racial tensions but, 40 years on and with an African American in with a very good shot of securing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the reactions of the couple’s parents to this interracial relationship – the horrified looks, the frozen stares – have become, amid the poignancy of the end of Hepburn and Tracy’s long relationship and knowledge that the racial problems at the time were very real indeed, unintentionally hilarious.
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