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Created Jan 15, 2016 11:22PM PST • Edited Jan 15, 2024 08:46PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn weren’t hardly done being the greatest couple in Hollywood history when they made Desk Set in 1957. Ten years later, they’d star as parents whose daughter brings home the very black Sydney Poitier as her fiancé in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. This isn’t that.

   Everything’s played for laughs in Desk Set, per the style of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who wrote it: a hyper-normative office setting where home lives don’t exist and they hold an idealized Christmas party.

   One Research Worker supplants half a dozen Reference Librarians when a mainframe gets brought into an office. Sponsoring this Hollywood movie was a marketing coup by IBM. Forward leaning in the extreme, Desk Set made promises half a century ahead of when they could be fulfilled, by Google. You know, natural language processing and all, back when machines were fed by punchcards. Now that’s marketing!

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Spencer Tracy was 57 when the movie was made, yet played a bachelor, silver haired and available.

   Katharine Hepburn’s research librarian extraordinaire is named Bunny Watson. Think that helped sell Big Blue on this strategic sponsorship just after Tom Watson Jr. succeeded Tom Watson Sr. as CEO of IBM?

   Kate – 50 when the movie opened – fixes a bug with a hairpin, not quite Adm. Grace Hopper but not bad.

   • Gig Young was the handsome fellow who plays her inconsistent suitor.
   • Joan Blondell brightens up the cast as her #1 girl.
   • Dina Merrill dressed up the office.
   • Sue Randall is also easy on the eyes.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Desk Set stands as a perfect periscope into mid-century American culture, hyped up though it may be.

11. Direction Great 4.0

    Walter Lang also directed There’s No Business Like Show Business

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    Phoebe and Henry Ephron, parents of four daughters, wrote the screenplay from William Marchant’s play.

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.8

    Kate says sex.

17. Sex Titillating 1.8

18. Violence Gentle 1.5

19. Rudeness Salty 2.1

21. Reality

    Glib 1.8

    Hyper-stylized mid-century Americana

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.4

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Glib 2.0