I ran my then-partner Bob the tape of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie Desk Set, from 1957, co-starring a state-of-the-art IBM computer with which efficiency expert Tracy plans to replace Hepburn’s job. Bob faulted the script for attributing powers to the computer (particularly in terms of being able to understand language inputs) that would tax the computing equipment of 1993, let alone 1957. But he enjoyed the movie otherwise — especially the scenes in which Tracy and Hepburn spar verbally with each other, and you realize these people are attracted to each other mainly by interest in each other’s brains (the main thing that’s kept Bob and I together this long, too — even a relatively weak Tracy/Hepburn film like Without Love is interesting because it’s about people who are both intelligent and unashamed of being intelligent, a refreshing change from the way most people behave in movies — and, come to think of it, in life as well). — 9/3/93
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Desk Set also benefits from a good supporting cast, notably Joan Blondell as one of Hepburn’s colleagues in the research department of the Federal Broadcasting Company (where the whole film took place) and Gig Young as the manager who’s sucking off Hepburn’s gifts (the film anticipates Nine to Five by 23 years in its depiction of an unscrupulous male boss who’s building a reputation for himself in the company through reports his female subordinate is really ghost-writing for him) while simultaneously promising her, and completely failing to deliver, a personal relationship. (As I pointed out to Charles, when Ralph Bellamy got too old to play guy-who-loses-the-girl parts Gig Young took them over.) While I tend to agree with Cult Movies author Danny Peary that the four films Hepburn made with Cary Grant are much more interesting and entertaining than the ones she made with Tracy (just as the Jeannette MacDonald/Maurice Chevalier films are far better than the MacDonald/Nelson Eddy films), Hepburn and Tracy were a great team when they forgot about making grand statements on the condition of the world (i.e. Keeper of the Flame and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) and instead just used the battle of the sexes as a backdrop for making us laugh (Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib and Desk Set) — though Charles told me he couldn’t fathom why the current film was called Desk Set, since the title told you little more about it than that it took place in an office. “It was based on a successful Broadway play, and they were stuck with the title,” I replied. — 7/18/97
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Last night’s other “Vintage Sci-Fi” movie was even more marginal as science-fiction than The Man in the White Suit, though it contains two of Hollywood’s most legendary actors, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, in the eighth of their nine films together and the first one in color: Desk Set, a 1957 romantic comedy that lays a slight satire on automation over the usual Tracy-Hepburn byplay we’d seen from the oddly matched couples they’d played in their previous comedies. Desk Set actually began as a Broadway play by William Marchant, who was apparently inspired by the real-life character of Agnes E. Law, the first head of the research department at the Columbia Broadcasting System (you know it by its initials, CBS). He was also inspired by the new “electronic brains” — computers — being marketed by companies like Univac and IBM, so he created a story in which a Law-like character named Bunny Watson finds her job as head of research at the Federal Broadcasting Corporation (though the initial inspiration was CBS the filmmakers actually shot their exteriors at NBC, including the iconic Christmas tree set up every year at NBC’s headquarters in Rockefeller Center) finds the job security of herself and her staff threatened when the head of the network, Mr. Azae, calls in IBM technology expert Richard Sumner to install a computer in her department. Both Azae and Sumner himself insist that the computer is only going in to help them do their jobs, but Bunny and her crew immediately assume it’s there to replace them. On Broadway this story starred Shirley Booth as Bunny (Booth was a much less assertive character than Hepburn and I’d presume Bunny came off in the play as considerably ditzier and less authoritative than she does in the Great Kate’s hands in the film) and the men in her life — Sumner and network vice-president Mike Cutler — were played by Byron Sanders and Frank Milan. Desk Set premiered on Broadway October 24, 1955 and ran for 296 performances — a solid hit — and the Hollywood Reporter originally said that Booth would repeat her role on screen.
She didn’t; instead the “suits” at 20th Century-Fox recruited Hepburn, and she in turn brought Tracy into the project for their first collaboration in five years. Alas, one thing Fox didn’t do was hire a major director for the film; instead of the names Tracy and Hepburn had worked with at MGM (George Stevens, George Cukor, Elia Kazan and Frank Capra) they put an amiable hack named Walter Lang on the project. At least they gave the job of adapting Marchant’s play into a script to competent and arguably brilliant hands: the husband-and-wife writing team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, whose daughter Nora Ephron would become a major writer-director in her own right in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Indeed, in 1998 she’d rework the old MGM classic The Shop Around the Corner into a vehicle for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, You’ve Got Mail!, which was also about a woman who finds herself falling in love with a man even though she’s worried that he’s going to destroy her livelihood. The film of Desk Set starred Tracy (top-billed, as he was in all his films with Hepburn — the legend is that once she protested, saying that as the lady she should go first, and Tracy replied, “This is a movie, chowderhead, not a lifeboat”) as Richard Sumner the computer expert, Hepburn as Bunny Watson the ace researcher, Gig Young as Mike Cutler (in the 1950’s he had largely taken over from Ralph Bellamy as the third man out in these sorts of romantic triangles, the decent but boring guy the leading lady would abandon in favor of a much more exciting and stimulating male lead in the last reel), and Joan Blondell an absolute delight as Peg Costello, second-in-command in the Federal Broadcasting research department. Though worn down in real life by age and three broken marriages, Blondell as a screen personality remained level-headed and the voice of reason in all the madness, and Dina Merrill and Sue Randall fill out Bunny’s staff ably if not spectacularly.
The film’s best scene is a battle of wits between Sumner and Bunny on the roof of the FBS building — he’s invited her to lunch to give her a series of psychological tests, including making her solve complicated math and logic problems on the fly, and she passes them all with flying colors — and it’s not until the third act (it’s the sort of film that you would probably guess was based on a stage play even if you didn’t know that in advance) that we finally get to meet the computer. Though IBM itself supplied the prop — which was recycled in two later 20th Century-Fox films, The Fly (1958) and Dear Brigitte (1965) — the machine, which is called EMERAC (for “Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator”) and affectionately referred to as “Emmy,” like the TV award, is just a prop, with giant tape drives whose tapes rotate in opposite directions, lights that flash in two random patterns that have nothing to do with what the Ephrons’ script tell us it’s supposed to be doing, punch-card inputs that couldn’t possibly handle the amount of data being fed into it, and a rate of input far faster than any real computer extant even now, much less in 1957. The huge mainframe Sumner shoehorns into the little research office, where the four people who work there were already being overshadowed by their books and files, is by far the most dated thing about this movie; the parts that hold up best are the by-play between Tracy and Hepburn and the voice-of-reason contributions of Blondell.
Like The Man in the White Suit, Desk Set in some ways is a more incisive satire now than it was in 1957, as the blessing/curse of automation has reached far beyond the white-collar office sector (the subject of this film as well as Allan Sherman’s marvelous early-1960’s song “Automation”: “There’s an RCA 503/Sitting over there where you used to be/Doesn’t have your charm, doesn’t have your shape/Just a bunch of punch cards and lightbulbs and tape, dear”) into blue-collar manufacturing, the service sector and even such once seemingly unautomatable jobs as bank tellers, gas-station attendants and grocery clerks. In an economic and social order so totally dominated by the imperatives of capital that just about all the productivity gains since the early 1970’s have been relentlessly distributed to the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, automation — like globalization — has become yet another way for the rich and powerful to further impoverish and enslave the not-rich and not-powerful. While the Ephrons’ script for Desk Set presents the ultimate pairing of the Tracy and Hepburn characters as the triumph of true love over opportunism (and stacks the deck by making the Gig Young character so actively unpleasant, far meaner than Bellamy was when he played these sorts of roles), one could imagine a more cynical version of the ending as Hepburn’s character hard-heartedly realizes that the machines are going to put her and her colleagues out of business, so she’d better marry one of the guys who’s going to be making money off automation.
What works best about Desk Set are the scenes between Tracy and Hepburn as well as such zany inspirations as Hepburn crooning Cole Porter’s (a personal friend of hers) “Night and Day” at an office Christmas party — she doesn’t have a great voice but she’s not bad; certainly some well-known cabaret singers (can you say “Libby Holman”?) got by with less voice than hers! — and her recitation of the poem “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight” as the computer endlessly spits out verse after verse of it, thereby shutting itself off from any other input since the script has established that EMERAC, for all its power, can only process one job at a time. There’s also the most morbidly satirical scene in the film, in which the computer previously installed in the payroll department goes haywire and sends pink slips to everyone in FBS’s employ, from Mr. Azae (Nicholas Joy) on down. That’s the one that really hurts: the idea that someday the machines may just decide they don’t need us anymore, and they’ll either let us die off or use us, Matrix-like, as an energy source …
