Beneatha is either intelligent and ambitious or selfish and stuck-up.
Walter Lee can be realistic and understandable to some while selfish and stupid to others. He seems to lean just a fair bit of amount more towards The Scrappy though.
From the 1961 film, it's a little hard to take Karl Lindner seriously. Mainly because when he opens his mouth, most people can only think of Piglet.
The scene where Bobo tells Walter about getting conned by Willie Harris comes off as hilarious in the 1961 movie, due to a mix of overacting and bad music cues.
Anyone who saw this play at the Apollo Theater in the early 80's might have seen a 12-year-old Tupac Shakur playing Travis.
Louis Gossett Jr. plays George Murchison in the 1961 film, making it his first ever film credit.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Walter. He does have several legitimately sympathetic things going for him - he's a poor father who's unable to provide the carefree life he wants for his son, he has what he thinks is a good idea to make some cash but his family refuses to support it, and these things leave him emasculated and hopeless. Unfortunately, he's such a smug, spoiled jerk all the time that it's hard to actually care about his plight. The fact that he steals Beneatha's cut of the insurance and blows it on his own dream, which turns out to be a scam simply cements him as completely unsympathetic to many audiences today, to the point that many feel his moment of redemption isn't enough to salvage him.
Beneatha has a few desires that seem perfectly sensible to a modern audience that the characters treat as absurd (though this is in part due to Beneatha's own pompous attitude). In particular, both Mama and Ruth are utterly baffled when Beneatha doesn't want to marry a wealthy man for silly reasons like "he's an asshole".
Mama slapping Beneatha for not believing in God (and mouthing off about it) is pretty uncomfortable today.
The Woobie: Bobo, who also has his life staked on the liquor store deal and unlike Walker, probably spent years saving his own money, only for it to be gone in an instance.
