Desk Set (1957)

Review Essay

It’s pretty difficult for a work of mass media to manage the balancing act of being both kitschy and timely.  When it comes to Desk Set, though, there’s this strange fusion at the heart of the movie, where it’s so obviously a throwback with its high-gloss midcentury aesthetics and its notions about women in the workplace and an “electronic brain” the size of a studio apartment…but it’s also a cautionary tale about how tech executives will overpromise and underdeliver, driving employees out of their jobs to replace them with ersatz garbage substitutes that drain the humanity out of work that is meaningfully human.  It couldn’t be more 1957 AND more 2025, at least when viewed through a certain lens.  While I’ll ultimately argue that, in Desk Set, we’re looking at a good and not a great film, I’ll also argue that it’s a movie whose time has once again come round.  And if you haven’t seen it before, friend, I think you’ll be in for a treat.

Why does Desk Set work as well as it does?  Well, for starters, it deploys the perfectly magical chemistry of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in their eighth screen pairing.  Hepburn is basically ideal casting for “Bunny” Watson—at fifty she’s both still an obvious stunner while being visibly old enough to work in the role of a woman nervous both about being made redundant at work and about maybe never getting that marriage proposal she’s been counting on from her boss (Mike Cutler, an arrogant and self-centered junior executive whose appeal to the hypercompetent Miss Watson must, I guess, depend on his flashy good looks).  Hepburn always comes across as smart and quick-witted in any role, and here, as the head of a bustling reference department, she’s the cool and collected jack-of-all-trades that any librarian dreams of being.  In Tracy, the film gets exactly the edge it needs: the character of Sumner could easily come across as oily and self-serving, much like Mike Cutler does, and in the original Broadway play that’s exactly how the character’s written.  But Tracy arrives on screen with the kind of gravitas we might not have expected in the role of, effectively, a gadget salesman, not to mention the kind of agile on-screen chemistry in banter with Hepburn that it’s going to take to make a romance work in the face of an obvious and major obstacle.  In their two sets of very capable hands, Miss Watson is more curious than cold to an obvious interloper in her domain, and Mr. Sumner’s clearly a little more interested in sizing up this remarkable woman than he is in measuring the office for vacuum tube installation.  It’s easy to lean forward and watch two masters of their craft whenever they’re on screen together.

The other thing that definitely works is the David vs. Goliath nature of the plot: we know from the beginning that the women in this office are underdogs, fighting not just the modern fascination with the latest technical advances but also the need of the otherwise useless suits in the penthouse to rationalize why they’re dropping a ton of money on a consultant.  And they’re charming as all get out, from the brassy Peg Costello, who plays not just Bunny’s employee but best friend and can rattle off Ty Cobb’s batting average at the drop of a hat, to the clever young Ruthie Saylor, who’s so keen to impress Miss Watson that a modern remake of Desk Set would have to acknowledge an obvious crush (chaste or no).  We want them to beat the “electronic brain” at its own game, not just to prove how skilled they are but so they can stay together, cracking wise and covering for each other’s mistakes and acting as mutual pals and confidants.  When Bunny Watson tells Peg Costello that, once they’re too “dried up” for dating, they’ll move in together and buy a bunch of cats, Peg instantly fires back, “But I don’t like cats; I like MEN.  And so do you!”  I laughed the genuine laughter of someone who would think Peg was a hoot and a half as a coworker, and I’ll admit, as a professional librarian, surely a little of Desk Set’s appeal is that I would find it endlessly fun to race up and down the spiral stairs of those reference stacks, shouting out the correct spellings for the names of Santa’s reindeer from the upper story.

Yes, Santa—don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the blog’s one central premise.  Desk Set relies heavily on Christmas as a setting for its second act, in which Bunny’s Christmas gift for Mike Cutler finds an unexpected utility, and in which we then get a series of hijinks and revelations in connection with the FBC’s office Christmas parties that seem to stretch uninterrupted throughout the corporate skyscraper.  From the Reference department’s tree, which is so strewn with honest-to-goodness 1950s tinsel that you can barely see the needles underneath, to Bunny advising Kenny, the office errand boy, on how to hustle the legal department for better Christmas tips, we’re totally immersed in a bustling Manhattan holiday, even if most of the trappings of an ordinary holiday movie aren’t really at work here (no crackling fireplaces, nobody’s visiting anybody’s parents, etc.).  Some Christmas traditions are observed here, though—we get a drunken revelation or two, and one bad (and unsuccessful) marriage proposal, of a sort.  The holiday isn’t the point of the movie, but the ways in which the holiday makes demands of us (and makes us feel demanding of others) are key to advancing the narrative.

I said up front that this is merely a good and not a great film, and I want to make sure I’ve conveyed that that’s true.  Like lots of media of its era, Desk Set has weird politics that sit uncomfortably on 2025, whether it’s Hepburn chanting the Song of Hiawatha with an energy I could have lived without, or the gender dynamics that force the smartest female characters into some of the dumbest poses for the sake of landing a man.  Also, one of the effects of Tracy’s softening Sumner as a character is that the movie loses a little bit of urgency: it’s not just that as audience members we can count on Tracy and Hepburn winding up together, but maybe more importantly, we just don’t get a Richard Sumner who seems like he actually wants to put anybody out of a job anyway.  When, at the Christmas party, Bunny accuses him of being “in love with Emily EMERAC,” it honestly feels weirdly inaccurate, because he’s said very little about EMERAC (and a lot about Bunny Watson) up to that point.  The film’s third act, therefore, struggles a little both with establishing stakes and in working out how to resolve relationships between characters that don’t seem to need a ton of resolution?  The fable we get, in the end, is cheerful but slight, in part because it all feels so unlikely.  This movie is fun but it’s not trying to say a lot.

We don’t always need a lot said, though.  Sometimes it’s more than enough to sit back and enjoy something: enjoy Miss Watson finally choosing herself over a man she’s been chasing for years.  Enjoy Richard Sumner’s helpless smile as he realizes how damn clever this librarian is sitting across from him.  Enjoy both Watson and Sumner as the film dances pretty cheekily close to the boundaries of the Production Code in putting them alone in her uptown apartment in a rainstorm, changing out of their wet things and into bathrobes before having dinner together.  If you give Desk Set a chance—whether it’s this holiday season or just any time of the year you want to believe that human scrappiness and ingenuity will win out over Grok 9.0 or whatever the techbro overlords end up proclaiming as the winner of the GenAI Wars—I bet you’ll come away smiling.  And we need movies like that.

I Know That Face: Joan Blondell, appearing in this film as Bunny’s plucky sidekick, Peg Costello, had appeared in a supporting role in the 1947 movie Christmas Eve, about a woman reuniting with her adopted sons on the titular holiday.  Ida Moore is credited as “Old Lady” but we learn from the girls in Research at one point that she was the iconic FBC mascot back in the 1920s or 1930s—Moore plays Mrs. Feeney, the Bird Lady in 1951’s The Lemon Drop Kid, a Bob Hope flick in which he’s got gambling debts to discharge before Christmas.  And we forget how much Katherine Hepburn, here the indomitable Bunny Watson, really does appear in holiday media throughout her illustrious career: her first big role is Jo March in 1933’s Little Women  which sets its opening act at Christmas, her final credited role is as Cornelia Beaumont in the 1994 television movie One Christmas, and in-between she appears in 1968’s The Lion in Winter (which I’ll cover on this blog later this season) as Eleanor of Aquitaine, as well as playing the role of Linda Seton in the 1938 film Holiday, a screwball comedy that sets key moments on New Year’s Eve.

That Takes Me Back: I mean, obviously, I am nostalgic for reference books in stacks despite working in a building that still has reference books in stacks (not like we used to, though! Ah, the good old National Union Catalog…).  It’s always fun to watch a movie of the right vintage that I catch sight of the iconic AT&T Model 500 telephone: if you’re my age or older, you can’t click on that Wikipedia link and tell me you don’t recognize that profile in a heartbeat.  I know, I know, this movie’s about not getting sentimentally attached to technology and I agree in many senses, but I see that old telephone and I’m an 8 year old, spinning that dial so I can talk to Grandma again.  I do love real tinsel hanging from a Christmas tree—I feel like nowadays we act like garland counts as “tinsel” but they are NOT the same thing and this is apparently a hill I’m at least willing to get badly bruised on.  And, okay, I’m not even slightly nostalgic for Cutler’s particular brand of midcentury chauvinism but it does take me back, I guess, in that every time he opens his mouth I think, “thank goodness for HR departments”.

I Understood That Reference: As alluded to above, one phone call requires Peggy to rattle off the names of Santa’s reindeer, and another of the girls observes that soon they’ll be asked for the complete text of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which in fact Bunny does later have to recite.  Later, Sumner stumbles into Watson’s office with questions about A Christmas Carol, which maybe was intended as a more pointed allusion but if it was, I missed the intended meaning.

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Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): The Christmas sequence isn’t the big opener or the big finale, so it maybe doesn’t have the same impact, but as I said earlier, there’s a lot of Christmas-related stuff here: gift giving and office parties and references to a ton of Christmas facts and stories.  It’s surprisingly seasonal for a movie that’s really not counting on Christmas at all as an emotional beat (or a source of thematic content).

Actual Quality (8.5/10): It’s a simple enough movie, but Tracy and Hepburn are a delight, and the film stands up on some level for the value of the human despite the allure of the machine.  It’s 2025 and I will take what I can get on that latter front, that’s for sure.  Seriously, it’s a romantic comedy first and foremost, and I’m a guy who is more willing to overlook the wobbles of a rom-com made 20-30 years before I was born than of rom-coms made in the last 2-3 years.  If you feel just the opposite, apply a necessary counterweight to my score in some measure, but even if you do, I would tell you that this one’s still worth your time.

Party Mood-Setter?  I think there’s not quite enough Christmas, and the success of the banter requires a little too much focus from you as an audience member, but honestly the midcentury vibes of the film are nice enough that I can easily imagine just having it on in the background while I was doing something else and finding it pleasant.

Plucked Heart Strings?  No, Hepburn and Tracy are a fun pair, but this isn’t deep romance as much as it is two seasoned combatants realizing they respect and admire each other enough that they’d make a good team.  In some ways that makes it more meaningful than something that’s more openly sentimental, but I really can’t imagine misting up at any point regardless.

Recommended Frequency: I think you’ve got to watch this one once for the Tracy/Hepburn of it, and honestly it might be a better Christmas movie than I’d realized….I just didn’t remember the Christmas sequences from when I watched it 20-25 years ago.  I bet it could make at least a semi-regular rotation and fit in nicely with more traditional members of the Christmas canon—I would take this over Bell, Book and Candle, at least, which I reviewed last year on the blog, and which seems to be the 1950s romantic comedy that every outlet online lists as a forgotten Christmas classic before they think of Desk Set.

Desk Set is surprisingly hard to get a hold of, given the fame of its stars: it’s not streaming for free anywhere, though almost all the major outlets for rental streaming will let you watch it for a few dollars.  The film is so hard to find on disc that I can’t link to Barnes & Noble, which doesn’t stock it: Amazon has only one copy I would call “affordable” and otherwise has either very expensive collector’s DVDs or a European Blu-ray from Spain.  This is one of the best case scenarios, I’d argue, for relying on your local library, since well over a thousand libraries in Worldcat claim to have a DVD copy available for checkout.  Regardless of how you track it down, I hope you enjoy enough of it that you’ll feel it was time well spent.