Desk Set (or His Other Woman in the UK) is a 1957 romantic comedy film directed by Walter Lang and starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gig Young, Joan Blondell, and Dina Merrill. The screenplay was written by Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron from the play by William Marchant.
Plot
Desk Set takes place at the "Federal Broadcasting Network" (exterior shots are of Rockefeller Center, headquarters of NBC). Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) is in charge of its reference library, which is responsible for researching and answering questions on all manner of topics, such as the names of Santa's reindeer. She has been involved for seven years with rising network executive Mike Cutler (Gig Young), with no marriage in sight.
The network is negotiating a merger with another company, but is keeping it secret. To help the employees cope with the extra work that will result, the network head has ordered two computers (called "electronic brains" in the film). Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), the inventor of EMERAC (an allusion to the early computers UNIVAC and ENIAC) and an efficiency expert, is brought in to see how the library functions, to figure out how to ease the transition. Though extremely bright, as he gets to know Bunny, he is surprised to discover that she is every bit his match.
When they find out the computers are coming, the employees jump to the conclusion the machines are going to replace them. Their fears seem to be confirmed when everyone on the staff receives a pink slip printed out by the new payroll computer. Fortunately, it turns out to be a mistake; the machine fired everybody in the company, including the president.
Views of Desk Set
As a movie, Desk Set has often been criticized, but the critics differ somewhat over whether the main problem was the unbelievable characterizations in the original play or the casting of Tracy and Hepburn in those parts. Watson, for example, is an extremely capable manager, but she buys a formal gown on approval in the breathless hope her executive boyfriend will ask her to the Country Club dance at Christmas—the same boyfriend who is her boss and gets his promotion to vice president because of the departmental budget she finalizes for him from his working draft.
The movie's real importance, though, is as propaganda, using that term in its most favorable sense of a public relations effort to convey a message of social significance. At the beginning of Desk Set, right after the credits, is a message about how much IBM helped in making the movie; at that time IBM had not quite finished establishing its dominance over the computer market, but computers were already starting to replace whole offices of clerical workers, and most Americans did not know much more than that about computers. This movie would prepare them for what computers were about to do to their society.
In the movie, Sumner is a computer engineer (called a "methods engineer" then but perhaps a "systems analyst" now) who is installing the two computers he has just sold FBN: one for the payroll department, and one for Watson's reference department. This showed, decades before the Internet was ever dreamed of, that besides its role as a calculating machine, the computer would revolutionize information storage and retrieval, too.
The room-sized EMERAC units (which is the size computers really were then) are portrayed as big, mechanical babies that need a safe environment (preparing people for the air conditioning requirements, both temperature and filtration, and other engineering considerations of real computers) and human beings, not only to program and maintain them, but to love them, too, for them to be able to carry out their intended missions. The explicit moral of the story, articulated by Sumner/Tracy so no one can miss it, is that a computer is not a monster that will take people's jobs away but a tool that will make their work easier and more enjoyable. One of the implicit morals is that computer people may seem a little quirky at times, but they are basically nice people.
The power of the computer as portrayed in the movie is staggering even by today's standards, and impossible for the time. For example, Sumner inquires whether Watson has seen the demonstration of EMERAC translating Russian into Chinese, a feat which current computers cannot perform with perfect accuracy.
A Canadian radio program, Bunny Watson, is named for and inspired by Hepburn's character in this film.
List of reference topics in the movie
The film's vision of the utility of the "electronic brain" as a tool for information storage and retrieval, is, of course, now fulfilled, and even nonspecialists can use the Internet to research, in depth, even the obscure topics mentioned in the film:
Trivia
Hepburn's boyfriend in the movie (before Tracy takes her from him) is named "Mike Cutler." This is in reference to famed "woman's director" George Cukor, who saved Hepburn's career when he directed her in The Philadelphia Story.
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