Desk Set
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Desk Set (or
His Other Woman in the U.K.) is a
1957 romantic comedy film directed by
Walter Lang and starring
Spencer Tracy (as "Richard Sumner") and
Katharine Hepburn (as "Bunny Watson"). Its screenplay was written by
Phoebe Ephron and
Henry Ephron from the play by
William Marchant.
Desk Set takes place at the "Federal Broadcasting Network" (a transparent alias for
NBC, given that the exterior shots are of
Rockefeller Center). The network is negotiating a merger with another company but is keeping that secret so far. To enable the employees to cope with the extra work from the increase in the company's size, the network head has ordered two
computers (referred to as "electronic brains" in the film.) When they find out the computers are coming, the employees jump to the conclusion the computers are going to replace them, and that misunderstanding leads to classic comedy.
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 a capable executive running the reference
library (a key department for the network), but she buys a formal gown on approval in the breathless hope her executive boyfriend (who has been stringing her along for the past seven years) will ask her to the Country Club dance this Christmas as much so today as then, which is one reason the film is a classic.
The movie's real importance, though, is as
propaganda, using that term in its broadest and most favorable sense of a
public relations effort to convey a message of social significance to some population. 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 an "efficiency expert" 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 (both temperature and filtration) requirements and other engineering considerations of real computers then) 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.
Desk Set at the
Internet Movie Database
