Desk Set (1957) was the eighth film featuring the incomparable screen duo of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy whose real life love translated brilliantly to the screen in crackling films like Woman of the Year (1942), Adam's Rib (1949), and Pat and Mike (1952).

But Desk Set is notable as the first non-MGM movie for the pair (Desk Set is a 20th Century Fox production), their first in color, and their first in widescreen CinemaScope. It was also their penultimate pairing; they wouldn't act together again until Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), the last film Tracy made before he passed away.

Desk Set was based on the play 'The Desk Set' written by William Marchant. After the play opened on Broadway in 1955, screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who also penned Daddy Long Legs (1955) and Carousel (1956), adapted it for the screen. One major change concerned the love story between the Hepburn and Tracy characters: in the play, there isn't one! The Ephrons added the romance to take advantage of the famous Hepburn-Tracy chemistry.

Hepburn and Tracy had been secretly together for about fifteen years, ever since making Woman of the Year (1942) by the time they made this movie; a secret because Tracy was married, though he and his wife Louise hadn't lived together since the 1930s. Although it was kept quiet from the public, Tracy and Hepburn's twenty-six year relationship was an open secret in Hollywood, though Hepburn didn't speak about it until after Louise passed away.

Desk Set takes place in the Reference Department of a television network called the Federal Broadcasting Company. Hepburn, Joan Blondell (that bold blonde from the Gold Digger films in the 1930s), Sue Randall and Dina Merrill play research whizzes with encyclopedic brains that spend their days answering questions ranging from the names of Santa's reindeer to a player's batting average, and nothing stumps these ladies for long.

Although this is set at a television network in New York (establishing shots show Rockefeller Center, echoing 30 Rock's opening), the Hollywood studios had similar departments. For example, MGM's enormous Research Department was housed in four buildings stuffed with 20,000 books and 250,000 clippings neatly cross-referenced on 80,000 index cards.

The researchers fielded queries from writers, producers, and the Art, Costume, and Prop Departments, and could answer 500 questions a day at their peak. It's likely a researcher in Fox's Research Department looked up the answer to a question Hepburn would later 'discover' in Desk Set!

Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, the Reference Department's head, and the most brilliant researcher of them all (playwright William Marchant based Bunny on CBS research librarian Agnes E. Law, who also had an astonishing brain and memory.)

Between running her department and researching the thorniest of queries, Bunny pines after an executive at the company named Mike (Gig Young). Mike has strung her along for seven years, and she is convinced he will propose soon, though her fellow researchers are less sanguine. But boring Mike takes a backseat when a friendly but uncommunicative man named Richard (Tracy) shows up and begins poking around the department.


Bunny does some research and finds out Richard is an expert in the new 'electronic brains,' (computers) and the machine named EMERAC, the 'Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator,' nicknamed 'Emmy,' is his personal project. (EMERAC was based on two real computers: ENIAC, developed in 1946, and UNIVAC, which came on the market in 1951. 20th Century Fox went to IBM for guidance when making Desk Set, and the studio included an acknowledgment to the company at the beginning of the picture.)

Meanwhile, under the perceived assault from Emmy, the researchers fight to prove their continued relevance. For example, when they receive a question about the island of Corfu, Emmy's operator misspells it 'curfew,' and the computer begins printing the long, long poem 'Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight' by Rose Hartwick Thorpe.

Bunny quietly sends one of her researchers to find the correct information, and then she recites the poem in dramatic fashion as Emmy starts to smoke amid a chorus of bleep-bleeps and flashing lights. It's a gloriously chaotic scene.

Bunny makes the sensible assumption that Richard is there to install Emmy in her department, and thus eliminate the need for human researchers. But despite their potential professional clash, Bunny and Richard immediately hit it off. Will their budding romance finally wipe Mike from Bunny's heart? Will Richard's computer end Bunny's career? Can their love survive such a conflict?

Although elements of this movie are extremely dated (Emmy is the size of the room and operates on punch cards), it's still fun to watch and remains quite relevant. Although computers and research databases are ubiquitous now, the core question of human/machine is still with us. And this film would have been exceptionally timely for audiences in 1957 as computers were beginning to be utilized commercially in the 1950s, and real 'Emmys' were eliminating scores of jobs.

Desk Set received mixed reviews, though most critics lauded the Hepburn-Tracy dynamic. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther thought the film lacked tension, mostly because no machine could ever really threaten Katharine Hepburn! He wrote, 'The thought of having Katharine Hepburn as an intellectual competitor is one that should throw fear and trepidation into the coils of any mechanical brain. Miss Hepburn is obviously a woman who is superior to a thinking machine.'

Crowther went on to declare the film was just okay, but the stars made it worth it: 'Best of all, there are Miss Hepburn and Mr. Tracy. They can tote phone books on their heads or balance feathers on their chins and be amusing -- which is about the size of what they do here. Under Walter Lang's relaxed direction, they lope through this trifling charade like a couple of old-timers who enjoy reminiscing with simple routines.'

I must agree, and I don't mind. I could watch Hepburn and Tracy toting phone books on their heads all day and be utterly entranced!

Cameron Howard has loved classic movies since she was a kid checking out VHS tapes from her local library. Today she lives in Durham, NC, and writes about classic Hollywood at The Blonde at the Film.