Coming six years before "guess who's coming to dinner " , "flame on the streets ' is much more convincing ;here one does not meet a bourgeois family whose daughter wants to marry a future Nobel Prize ;it takes place in the British low middle-class ; it all happens in one day ,on Guy Fawkes '.
The fifth of November is a judicious choice: it's time for celabration,merrymakings in the streets , but it also means alcohol, violence,interracial resentment which has been building up for years.
Kathy Palmer's plan does not bode well in that context : to marry an educated black schoolteacher (Peter Lincoln ,check the surname) in the early sixties is a thing her mom -who blames her husband for not climbing up the social scale- would never accept ,in a month of Sundays .
The dad 's attitude is more ambiguous : in the meeting , superbly played by John Mills , he delivers a liberal speech, urging the men from the union to stand together , and championing the promotion as a foreman of a colored man ;but when confronted to his daughter's plan , without being so openly racist as his wife , his finer feelings have vanished into thin air and he tells the young schoolmistress what she should "ideally " do.
In the streets , meanwhile ,hatred is simmering , the riot is brewing : not only the angry young white louts ,but also the colored girls , or the gossip ladies who "warn " Kathy's mom , nobody is prepared to accept peace,love and understanding .So Kathy 's predicament is mirrored by this town on fire ; given the hostile milieu ,the denouement cannot ,by any means,considered a happy end .There was still a hard road to hoe.
