Among the usual holiday films that show up this time of year, the one I’m really waiting to see again, for the umpteenth time, is DESK SET. It’s not available on DVD, and I refuse to buy even one more VHS tape, so I’m kinda dependent on one or more of the cable channels showing it at least once a year. Made in 1957; starring Tracy and Hepburn; set in the corporate offices of a fictional TV network called the Federal Broadcasting Corporation, or FBC. On the small chance you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, it’s NBC and NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center (“30 Rock†to quote Benjy Stone in MY FAVORITE YEAR, another film about a TV network in the ‘50s).
Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, the fortyish head of the network’s research department. Bunny and her co-workers, played by Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill (before she started favoring that unfortunate “flip†hairstyle that she wore for about 30 years), and one other woman whom I shall refer to henceforth as Generic Brunette Ingenue Type or GBIT, toil merrily (or, in Dina’s case Merrilly) all day long in the aforementioned department, which serves the FBC network as a kind of primitive, pre-Google (not to mention pre-Internet) search engine. Bunny and ‘the girls’ spend their daily 9 to 5 tracking down answers to questions such as: What kind of car does the king of the Watusi tribe drive? And : How much damage is caused annually to American forests by the sprucebud worm?
…In short: it’s my dream job, and it is just as much now as it was way back when I first saw this movie (probably 35 years ago or more).
Bunny and her staff, when they’re not busy looking up the details of myriad vastly interesting topics, are forever going downstairs to the corporate lunch counter for a coffee break, or spending the noon hour drooling over fabulous outfits at Bonwit Teller, or dishing via the company grapevine- -a secretarial backchannel within the network that keeps everyone instantly updated on who’s been promoted and who’s getting the dreaded pink slip.
Bunny herself is a valued corporate commodity, compensated well enough to wear Adrian and St. Laurent duds and live in a swanky midtown apartment with a fireplace and vaulted ceilings. There she spends her off hours preparing the kind of desserts nobody makes in 2004, like “Floating Islandâ€, whatever that is, and waiting for phone calls from her up-and-coming VP boyfriend who has a problem with commitment, as that kind of executive boyfriend always does. His looks are of the flippant, smarmy, Gig Young variety- -possibly because he’s played by Gig Young. Bunny fusses and sighs over him and pays him all the expected attentions, Gig being a real Catch and all, but it’s clear that she’s just going through the motions; doing her best 1950s career gal swoon while wondering if she will ever meet her intellectual equal… her soulmate… the man of her dreams.
Right on cue, Spencer Tracy comes shambling into Bunny’s department one day and without a word begins measuring the floor space, making cryptic entries on a little notepad, reading over the women’s shoulders, and generally being a pain, albeit a mysterious and vaguely ominous one. Eventually he introduces himself as Richard Sumner, an efficiency expert hired by the head of the network. Sumner/Tracy is an absent-minded scientist type who wears mismatched socks and has no perceptible social skills. He’s a great admirer of Beauty With Brains, plus he’s cute as a Gund teddy bear himself, so it’s perfectly obvious what will happen next. Bunny eyes him and simultaneously warms to a fellow egghead, is appalled by his proto-geekiness, and suspects that he’s the harbinger of corporate downsizing for her beloved troop of research gals. But even so, how can she resist? He IS played by Spencer Tracy, after all. Sh-boom! It’s love!
Being such a pair of whiz kids, it’s no time at all before Bunny discovers that Sumner is actually the developer of one of those newfangled “electronic brainsâ€, and Sumner learns that Bunny can effortlessly solve logic problems and deconstruct palindromes while sitting outside in sub-zero temperatures eating a roast beef sandwich. Falling hard, Sumner compares Bunny to a rare tropical fish, an analogy that sends shivers through the besotted Bunny even more than the Arctic blast raking across the rooftop Sumner has inexplicably chosen as the site for a lunch date. Bunny guesses that Sumner is planning to install his invention, a livingroom-sized computer named EMERAC, in the research department. She also surmises that EMERAC is meant to replace her and Joan Blondell and Dina Merrill and GBIT. Oh! What will happen? What will happen??! (as the soon to be spoiled by success Rock Hunter was wont to say in that very same year of 1957).
And there you have the set up. The rest of the movie is a series of false assumptions, mistaken identities, witty ripostes, banter and silliness. Bunny and Joan get plastered at the company Christmas party and keep calling the Lexington Avenue bus “the Mexican Avenue busâ€, which for some reason is hilarious. Sumner gets soaked in a rainstorm and has to take refuge in Bunny’s apartment, where he must doff his wet clothes and innocently don the gift bathrobe meant for Gig, who of course puts in a surprise appearance just in time to Assume the Worst. (Bunny, you slut!) Then Sumner puts the finishing touch on his conquest of Bunny’s heart by doing a comedic impression of a disheveled drunk guy, which reduces Hepburn to a snorking, guffawing puddle of mirth.
EMERAC’s operator-technician turns out to be a tight-sphinctered prig with her hair done up in a bun, who is such an illiterate drone that in the climactic scene she incorrectly inputs the name of the island Corfu as “Curfewâ€, which makes EMERAC go all haywire and inspires Bunny to give an over the top rendition of the Rose Hartwick Thorpe chestnut “Curfew Must Not Ring To-night!â€. (It should be noted that EMERAC, one of the very few computers that can be fixed with a bobbypin, is portrayed in this film by a wall-sized rectangle of synchronized flashing lights which went on to co-star in the movie and TV series “Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea†and a couple episodes of “Star Trek†a few years later.) Ultimately everything works out fine, Tracy and Hepburn end up in a clinch, and the credits roll - -on perforated-paper computer printouts, of course.
I just love it. Always have. Everyone else seems to rank this movie way down on the list alongside the lesser entries in the Tracy- Hepburn ouevre, but for me, it sits squarely up on top - - even ADAM’S RIB can’t exceed it in providing sheer, perfect enjoyment. And now, today, the same as the first time I saw it, I still wind up yearning to be Bunny Watson…..
Posted: January 2nd, 2004 under General.
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