Before The Age of The Internet There Was…Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey’s Desk Set

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Desk Set, starring Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracey, 1957  

 

Yes, to answer the question posed by the title of this sketch, before the Internet, before the whole web of now baffling sets of social networking and media outlets to while away the hours there was, well, a love story involving computers, and their uses back in the day, back in the 1950s days when one computer was housed in a whole room of some dimensions. Hard as it is to believe now that you can get a million times more information off of your smart phone than the humongous machines were capable of producing back in the 1950s this whole modern “information superhighway” superstructure posed certain questions then continue to haunt us today. That is the subtext to the film under review, Desk Set, the sophisticated romantic comedy starring the famous Hollywood acting couple Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey.     

Ironically the story line of this film is set in the New York network broadcasting industry at a time when that medium, when conventional television, was “king of the hill” and which is now embattled with about six million other ways of getting information available at the click of a button. But like all business enterprises then and now, the bottom line was, and is, to get the biggest profits the most effective and cost-productive way possible. Enter automation, enter the replacement of the human factor with the efficiencies of the machine. Sound familiar? The way this one plays out is that Sam (played by Tracey), a crackerjack engineer who helped create the then first word in computers, was hired by the broadcast company to streamline its operations with the new machines (then mainly produced when they were of monstrous size by IBM) and one of the first targets was the research department headed by crackerjack head researcher Bunny (played by Hepburn and where the scriptwriters got the name Bunny for the very proper Miss H can only be accounted for by the old Wasp network of Sunnys, Bunnys, Muffys in horse country places or at institutions like Bryn Mawr). Thus the battle is joined.               

Sam and Bunny do their dance, the dance around the subtext message at first about the uses of computers to streamline the research work process which had Bunny and her co-workers (three very smart women who nevertheless in the 1950s wound up as clerks in the research department rather than upstairs running things in the executive suites) worried about their jobs, and rightly so. That worry gets resolved rather simply when the obvious truth about information machines (then, now it might be a bit more problematic)-they are only as good as the humans who put the information in and analyze it meant they would  have more work to do rather than less and would have a higher rate of productivity to satisfy that bottom line. (That same condition applies today although on a global basis begging the question of who will be doing that more productive work-some Seven Sisters graduate or some up and coming smart woman in Mumbai.)     

Nice theme but let’s get back to reality for after all whether using computers or books as the subtext Hollywood is looking for a romantic resolution to a romantic comedy and while we can love our modern technology the fate of the computer is not going to fill seats in a movie theater. But the love triangle pitch certainly will. Bunny was, well, hung up on this guy, Mike, who was on his way up in the company but who couldn’t commit to a serious relationship (a serious relationship meaning one that ended in marriage) until Sam came on the scene and started making Bunny think twice about her status as Mike’s easy thing, as his dishrag. Naturally despite all the travails with the computers gumming up the works and the situation with Mike Bunny and Sam wound up as an “item” of gossip for the water cooler break crowd. See 1950s Hollywood didn’t let us down.