The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 436

''v' MOVIE REVIEWS Dinner Gold Blood to Bow BY CHARLES CHAMPUN JtU s- 'GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER' A Columbia picture. Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer. Written by WilHam Rose. Photographed by Sam Leavitt. Edited by Robert C.

Jones. Designed by Robert Clatworthy. Music by Devol. Featuring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier. Katharine Houghton, Cecil Kellaway, Bean Richards, Roy E.

Glenn Isabell Sanford, Virginia Christine, Alexandra Hay, Barbara Randolph. ville Martin, Tom Heaton, Grace Gaynor, Skip Martin. John Hudkins. PATTY DUKE IN SCENE FROM ALLEY OF THE 'Dolls7 and 'House' Due This Week BY KEVIN THOMAS Because of the eye-straining number films opening this week the count Is now 20 or thereabouts we are departing from the usual operating procedures and assessing four of the Hew pictures in this space today i In the adjoining columns, Kevin Thomas contemplates Fox's "Valley of lhe Dolls" and MGM's import, "Our Mother's House." I'll herewith have a word about two social documents, both from Columbia, Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood." Spencer Tracy's final film and moreover a last teaming withKatha-rine Hepburn qualifies, all other con- siderations aside, as must-viewing for anyone who has ever cared about movies. And just on those terms, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is a deeply-moving film, guaranteed to leave no eye undamp.

Tracy's performance is by any standards a superb valedictory for one of Hollywood's greatest careers. The craggy face was craggier than ever, with experience etched deep into every fold and crevice. Yet the portrayal has a strength and an earthy, irascible vitality which quite belies any hints that he was to die within days of the completion of shooting. He is marvelous, and it is impossible to think of another actor who could have brought to the part anything like the same warm, troubledeloquent humanity. Magic Works The magic (nothing less) which Tracy and Miss Hepburn had engendered in all of the previous screen outings together works again though now with a valedictorian depth of feeling and tenderness which, admittedly, the viewer partly projects into what he sees but which, also, is there and evident in the playing.

Their final confrontation in the movie is, at the level of personal drama, almost unbearable to watch. Indeed the film would have been a compelling experience even if it had been only a brittle comedy about very little. But "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is not, of course, about very little. It is about interracial marriage. As almost must already know, Tracy and Hepburn play a pair of old-line crusading liberals (he is -a San Francisco newspaper publisher, she has an art gallery).

Their daughter (Miss Hepburn's niece, Katharine Houghton) returns from a vacation in Hawaii bringing home to dinner the man she intends to marry and he is guess who Sidney Poitier. The anguish of liberal philosophy suddenly faced off against the harsh realities of an illiberal world is what makes William Rose's story go. The action spans less than half a day. Before it is done, Poitier's parents (Roy Glenn Sr. and Beah Richards), the Negro maid (Isabell Sanford), a salty old Catholic priest (Cecil Kellaway) and assorted point-making lesser type have joined the dialog (in both senses of the term).

Given the essential premises, Rose's script is sharp, often savagely funny and unsparing. It is almost a play, and would with a bare minimum of change, work perfectly well on the stage. It strongly implies acts, and its characters meet, disperse, group and re-group, permutating and talking, with choreographic precision and care. It is a well-made play in the form of a well-made movie, a picture of words Kramer has seen to it that the words are well-delivered. Poitier gives a performance which cannot be faulted.

Rose has given him a long, searing rebuttal to his father which is one of the film's several high points. VALLEY OF THE DOLLS A 20th Century-Fox presentation of a Mark Robson-David Welsbart production. With Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke. Paul Burke, Sharon Tate, Tony Scotti. Martin Mitner, Charles Drake.

Ale Davton, Lea Grant, Susan Hayward. Naomi Stevens, Robert H. Harris, Jacqueline Susann, Robert Vlharo, Joey Bishop, George Jessel. Producer: David Welsbart. Director: Mark Robson.

Camera: WilHam Daniels. Art directors: Jack Martin Smith, Rknard Day. Screenplay: Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Ktnoslev. Film editor: Dorothy Spencer. Sound: Don J.

Bass-man, David Dockendorf. Assistant director: EH Dunn. 'Costume designer: Travilla. Music adapted and conducted by Johnny Williams. Songs: Andre and Dory Prevtn.

All the wizardry of Hollywood has been tapped to transform "Valley of the Dolls" from sow's ear into silken purse. On the whole, the alchemy succeeds, resulting in an absorbing melodrama of pertinence and wide appeal. In place of Jacqueline; Susann's fevered, splotchy prose there is Mark Robson's astute direction, William Daniels' gleaming camera work, Andre and Dory Previn's poignant songs, and. Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley's tautly structured, well-shaped (and very salty) screenplay that manages to be faithful to the source while occasionally succumbing to its amusing gaucherie. i What's more, those pill-taking he- -roines and the men in their lives have been cast with.

care. In short, Robson and his colleagues have preserved Miss Susann's shopgirl fantasies of fame and fortune because they are deliberately aiming at as wide an audience as possible while performing their tasks with as much taste as possible. The sets are sumptuous, there is much beautiful New England scenery, and the four leading ladies have been handsomely gowned in $150,000 worth of Travilla costumes. Miss Susann's sexploitation method of storytelling has gotten her book dismissed as trash. Yet for all its crassness she did create four women who are, if anything, altogether too true to life.

Girls do dream of great success and love, some do get them, and those who do often pay the terrible price Miss Susann's heroines pay. With her blend of equal parts knowingness and naivete, Miss Susann shares her heroines' glamorous dreams and in fact has achieved them. Had she not participated in them she might not have been able to breathe life into her characters. After all, what would "Pamela," the first English novel, have been had not Samuel Richardson been a sex-obsessed Puritan? Miss Susann's credible, most fully drawn character was Neely O'Hara, the singing, star who was so self-destructive that she must destroy others to keep from destroying herself, Patty Duke, shattering her child actress image forever, plays, her to hilt, moving from bubbly, ambitious youngster to foul-mouthed, pill-addicted stardom. It's a gutsy, all-stops-out performance, the kind that gets Acade- my Patrician beauty Barbara Parkins, who plays Anne, the nice girl from New England, and Sharon Tate, who is the tragic, statuesque Jennifer, do very well in less flamboyant roles.

Susan Hayward is terrific in an all-too-brief, appearance as Helen Lawson, the tough, durable queen of Broadway Right down to the last extra, the players have been shrewdly cast. The footloose bachelor; in Mjss Parkins' life, a likable cad, has been suavely played Paul Burke, Newcomer Tony Scotti impresses as the incurably ill singer. Miss Tate marries; and Lee Grant makes the thankless role of Scotti's sister-guardian vital and sympathetic. Like Robson's "Peyton Place" 10 years ago, Valley of the Dolls" (at Grauman's Chinese Wednesday) is still another sensational bestseller that became a satisfying Clayton's Newest -f-'I a Study in Suspense In the past decade British director Jack Clayton has made but four films, but each has been unique and outstanding. After creating the realism of "Room at the Top" with its classic rake's progress Clayton began to probe deeper into the disturbed psyche in "The Innocents" and "The Pumpkin Eater." In his distinguished adaptation of Henry James "Turn of the Screw" there was a tantalizing ambiguity as to whether Deborah Kerr's governess was being terrified by her precocious charges or whether the weird happenings in their gloomy manse were in fact figments of her In "The Pumpkin Eater" Clayton laid bare the deep weels of guilt and fear in -Anne Bancroft- that made her a' compulsive procreator.

Now, in "Our Mother's House," his masterpiece, he i Questions Arise But if the movie's entertainment value is unquestionable, questions do arise. In taking a thorny, and difficult theme, Kramer and Rose were then seemingly at pains to make it palatable for the greatest number. They have come up with a comfortably old-fashioned picture, set in the comfortably old-fashioned upper-middle-class milieu of soundstage decor. And in Tracy and Hepburn as their advocates they had as comfortably warm an endorse ment as Hollywood could provide. The safety first approach is reflected most sharply in the characterizing of Poitier.

He is not simply a doctor, he is a magna cum laude from Johns Hopkins, a Yale professor, assistant director of the World Health Organization, author of a list of books and papers "as long as your a man who pays for his own phone calls. "No wonder he doesn't have much to say about himself," Tracy says on hearing all this; "who the hell would believe him?" But the barb does not relieve the sting of suspicion that the dice have not simply been loaded but glued to the table. The universality of the problem has been eased toward solution via an actor and a curriculum vitae which are extraordinarily specific. The nagging uneasiness is that the problem has not really been confronted Please turn to page 18 'tip Spencer Tracy as he appears in leading role for "Guest Wio' Coming fo Dinner." FOURTEEN.