Desk Set (1957)

I usually wait longer between comedies, partly because there aren't a whole lot that I want to see. But it's good to have one on hand on a day when you receive sad news, as I had (details not to be described here). This color comedy sat near the front of my streaming list.

A group of library reference clerks takes notice when an eccentric stranger with few people skills, Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), starts measuring their work space. Their boss told Sumner not to explain his purpose, but they can guess: The company plans to buy an "electronic brain," which usually means layoffs. Head clerk Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) gradually, accidentally develops some sort of closeness with Sumner, despite her hopes to marry the exec (Gig Young) she's been seeing for years.

Man oh man, I hadn't seen a setup so technologically dated since Pillow Talk (1959). The opening credits on a printer warned me well enough. When we finally see the computer in the third act, it looks like an ENIAC with a little retro sci-fi embellishment. At least its performance isn't terribly impossible. Really, the most ludicrous thing about it is the idea that it had already received all the info in the library in a matter of weeks, with no team seen feeding it in.

But perhaps those details don't really matter. After nearly 60 years, we still have fears about computers replacing people in various lines of work. In that sense, the story is pretty timeless.

It's also worth noting that the film ultimately neither reveres nor condemns the new tech. We get an acknowledgment that computers can save time but still make enough mistakes to need, shall we say, babysitting. That's machinery in a nutshell, when you think about it.

Unlike Pillow Talk, Desk Set doesn't strike me as notably sexist. The four clerks, all female (and passing the Bechdel test, for what that's worth), are impressive in the information they don't need to look up. Bunny follows a strange logic for problem solving, but there's no implication of a gender basis for that. Nor does it annoy Sumner; in fact, he might like that about her.

To my mind, there's something refreshing about watching people search for information in an old-fashioned way. Not that I want to relive the days when more difficult questions could take hours or even a month to resolve, but I appreciate the human element and could almost smell the books.

As a comedy, it's quaint but not bad. Some of the lines, especially from the clerks, get colorful in their sarcasm. Tracy actually got genuine on-screen hysterical laughter from two of them with an improvised moment, tho it didn't do much for me.

I don't quite know what to make of the romance part. Every step is awkward, and I'm not entirely convinced that Bunny makes the best choices in the end, predictable tho they may be. But the same could be said of a lot of romantic comedies.

Now I've seen four Tracy-Hepburn collaborations, among them Woman of the Year, Adam's Rib, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Of the four, Desk Set probably comes in third place for me, but that's not saying much. I respect them all.