SUNDAY, JULY 14 @ 10:00 PM ET
Desk Set is a pleasant but light-weight romantic comedy, the eighth of nine Tracy/Hepburn films. She’s Bunny Watson, the head of the research department at the Federal Broadcasting Network. He’s Richard Sumner, an “efficiency expert” employed by FBN to install an “electronic brain:” a computer called EMIRAC (an obvious reference to ENIAC, the first fully functional electronic computer which had been developed a decade earlier at the University of Pennsylvania). Bunny and her “girls” in research naturally see this as an existential challenge. When one of her staff exclaims that “He’s trying to replace us all with a mechanical brain,” Hepburn counters that “I’d match my memory against any machine’s any day….” Even in 1954, that line probably sounded a little ridiculous; today-well, let’s call it quaint.
But the battle is joined. EMIRAC is installed and “the girls” prepare for the research showdown: “let’s show him what people can do.” It’s the old “man vs. machine” contest: John Henry vs. the steam-powered drill; the horse vs the horseless carriage. No spoiler alert on who wins the showdown. Watch the film and find out.
Gender issues are also a subtext of interest in watching this film six decades later. Hepburn is a strong, competent professional woman who nevertheless is subservient to her fiancé Mike (Gig Young). He’s an executive who comes to her with his most pressing problems. She gives him solutions, but maintains the fiction that he “wears the pants.” Meanwhile, she’s a department head, and her staff of ultra-competent young women (Joan Blondell Dina Merrill and Sue Randall) are known condescendingly as “the girls.”
P.S. Pretty funny that in the credits for this early film about computers, I noticed that the Color Consultant was named Leonard Doss (you probably have to be as old as me to remember the DOS prompt).
To watch promo CLICK HERE
