Desk Set (1957) - film review

Bunny Watson runs the reference department of the Federal Broadcasting Network, leading a team that provides answers swiftly and accurately on a whole range of topics to anyone else in the company.  Bunny is happy in her work but has a frustrated love life.  For seven years she had been dating company executive Mike Cutler, but the prospect of marriage continues to be a distant dream.  One day, a strange man turns up in Bunny’s offices, equipped with a tape measure and sardonic humour.  The man, Richard Sumner, introduces himself as an electronics engineer, the inventor of the EMERAC computer, and explains that the company intends to purchase two of his machines in the interests of efficiency and cost reduction.  Bunny and her team soon realise what this means.  They are all to be replaced by a computer!

Desk Set brings together Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn for the last but one time, their eighth screen collaboration in fifteen years, and easily one of their most enjoyable.  The film was a timely satire on the threat posed by computers in the workplace, although it loses its satirical teeth about halfway through and ends up resembling a promotional film for the computer industry (not surprisingly, as IBM part-financed the film).  The film may have appeared upbeat when it was made but, given the prevalence of computers today, it now seems rather prophetic.  The thing that most dates the film is the enormity of the computer - it is a room-filling monstrosity that looks like it has been borrowed from the set of a sci-fi B-movie.  Were IBM happy with the computer’s habit of going wrong and repeatedly having to be fixed with a hair grip?  Maybe it wasn’t the best promotion they could have asked for...

Although the computer ultimately steals the show, the film is primarily another vehicle for the comedic talents of Tracy and Hepburn, who spark off one another with as much gusto as ever.  Their scenes together have enough electricity to power a small town, and they are particularly well-served with a script that crackles with wit and intelligence.  The high points are a rooftop lunch break which turns into a Mensa-style inquisition and a Christmas office party in which a champagne-fuelled Hepburn shows us why she never made it into the musicals (accompanied by Tracy on the bongo drums), whilst intermittently reeling off the names of Santa’s reindeer.  Just as side-splittingly funny is the scene in which Gig Young discover Hepburn and Tracy innocently having supper together, in their dressing gowns, in Hepburn’s apartment.  Desk Set is a delight, a superior romantic comedy that has worn well and is as warm and tirelessly entertaining as every other Hepburn-Tracy hook-up.

© Alex Sullivan 2011

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