guess who's -- dinner

Watched "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner"
(1967, Spencer Tracy; Katharine Hepburn; Sidney Poitier)
yesterday, TCM.

"Well I'll be a son-of-a-bitch."
I remember watching this movie when they showed it on network TV: my father said, when Spencer Tracy spoke the above line, that it was very unusual and not ordinarily OK to say that phrase on television.

He said something to the effect that because this movie was so good, and so important, that the network could make an exception and have a cursing phrase like that in there.

(Yes, yes, I'm a thousand years old.
Today, we consider ourselves fortunate to hear such polite, elegant, and lovely phrases, if we hear "son-of-a-bitch" on TV -- !
We're like, "Oh, great! They're raising the standard!")

In the scene toward the end where Sidney Poitier kind of tells off his father -- or, tells him to get off his back -- I got to looking at the actor playing the part of Mr. Prentiss, the father -- I kept thinking, I've seen that actor in something else; his face is so familiar. Finally I came up with it -- he played the part of Heathcliff Huxtable's father on "The Cosby Show" in the 80s.

I was so psyched this morning -- I was 99.99% sure I was going to look up The Cosby Show and find that the same actor that was Sidney Poitier's father in "Guess" -- Roy E. Glenn, Sr. -- was going to be listed as Cliff's dad on Cosby --

I was WRONG.

Different dude.

The shape of the face was so similar -- at least, to me, it seemed...

Turned out Glenn WAS in another movie I remember from my childhood --
"...tick...tick...tick..."

Watched that on network TV years after it was made

Wiki pedia tells me:
> > > > "...tick...tick...tick... is an American movie made in 1970 directed by Ralph Nelson. Racially provocative for its time, it stars Jim Brown in the role of an African-American man elected as the sheriff of a rural county in the American South. It has become something of a cult classic for its cutting-edge portrayal of racial relations and its tense narrative. < < < <

(Think that's "race relations," not "racial relations" ...)

When I saw that movie on TV, I remember I went to school the next day -- I was a junior or senior in high school. I told my history teacher, Mr. Wiblemo, about the movie. I thought he would be impressed with my re-telling, or maybe he had seen it and would relate to it, but he just made fun of the title. He thought "tick tick tick" was weird.

At the time, my confidence was somewhat shaken but I still thought it was a good movie.

Now that the Internet encyclopedia tells me the movie was "provocative," "cutting-edge", and had "tense narrative," I feel vindicated. My history teacher should have been less quick to scoff.

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