Desk Set (1957)
***
Director: Walter Lang
In Desk Set Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, head of the reference department at a national television network, an all-female department staffed by Hepburn and her three coworkers (Dina Merrill, Sue Randall, and a delightful Joan Blondell). When their territory is invaded by an absent-minded “methods engineer,” Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), who shows up unannounced one day and begins measuring the office space, Bunny assumes Sumner is some sort of efficiency expert hired to reorganize the layout of the office. But nobody knows for sure what he is up to until twenty minutes or so into the film, when he drops a bombshell. He is actually a computer engineer whose job is to install a giant computer (or “electronic brain,” in the jargon of 1957) to store all the information currently held in the department’s archives of print sources. Bunny, who has an absolutely retentive memory for all sorts of minutiae organized according to her own idiosyncratic method, is intellectually offended by the prospect of being replaced by a machine. “I’d match my memory any day against any machine,” she boasts. The other women in the office have a more practical concern: they can’t afford to lose their livelihood.
As you might expect, romantic complications soon arise. For seven years Bunny has been dating an executive at the network, Mike Cutler (Gig Young), in the expectation that a proposal of marriage is forthcoming, but to no avail. After she and Richard are caught in a rainstorm, she invites him to her apartment, where they slip into bathrobes and enjoy a comfortable dinner (fried chicken prepared by Richard) while their clothes dry. When Mike shows up unexpectedly, he jumps to the wrong conclusion and leaves in a huff. Things reach the crisis point during the drunken office Christmas party when Mike finally proposes—but on the assumption that Bunny will give up her career and life in New York and follow him to his new job in California—and the entire office learns that the new computer is to be installed the next day. The rest of the movie explains how Bunny’s romantic dilemma and the department’s uncertain future are ultimately resolved. (Happily, of course, for this is a comedy.)
This was the first Tracy-Hepburn movie shot in color. It was also the first not made by MGM, but instead at 20th Century-Fox, by Fox house director Walter Lang. The British film critic and historian Leslie Halliwell calls him a “director of competent but seldom outstanding entertainments,” and I would say that is a fair summation of this film. When the plot begins to drag, you can sit back and admire the elaborate production design and the chic wardrobes of Hepburn and her female costars. Or you can always direct your attention to the imaginative ways Fox house cinematographer Leon Shamroy applies the CinemaScope screen ratio typical of the studio’s output in the 1950s to the intimacy of a romantic comedy. Especially interesting is the way he treats the reference department as a sort of stage (the movie was, in fact, based on a play), spreading the actors and props across the screen and using dollops of color to break up the monolithic shape of the frame.
Desk Set is a bit slow to get started, the exposition of its first section more functional than engaging. The situations and characters surrounding Tracy and Hepburn have the slightness of a sitcom, although a very smoothly engineered and not unintelligent sitcom. When the focus settles on Tracy and Hepburn, however, things immediately pick up. Their interactions are quite well written, especially the scenes in which they are the only two characters present, and form the core of the film’s appeal. By the time Desk Set was made, these two were so comfortable with each other onscreen that they could have taken turns reading the telephone book and made us believe it was as witty as the dialogue in a play written by Oscar Wilde. There is no doubt that their personal charisma and their star power are the things above all else that put this movie over.
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The year is 2000: Jesse Pelletier is a Vietnam Vet who runs a small hotel in a little port on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. He’s 56. It’s been 10 years since he divorced his wife and got on his daughter’s shit-list. But the daughter, Suzy, has decided to come to Nicaragua to visit the old man and see if they can reconcile. Jesse’s love interest is a half-Nicaraguan California woman, Caitlin Cuadra, who has her own sailboat: she’s skinny, tough and gorgeous in a post-chemo sort of way (she’s been battling the Big C.) Jesse’s old Vietnam buddy Tapper also turns up—he says he’s been exporting Nica shrimp to LA (turns out he also trained Contras in Honduras in the 8os): he’s semi-drugged-up, foul-mouthed, and clearly into more stuff than just shrimp.
As it happens, I was having this very conversation with the film producer Anne Carey and the Chilean director Pablo Larrain a couple of weeks ago. They are interested in developing this book for film, and we were talking about the challenges of casting over breakfast. Or, actually, breakfasts plural—I met them at the same restaurant in Chelsea at the same time of day on two different days. I sat in the same chair, ordered the same thing.Certainly the character of Fiona would be easy and fun to cast. I think Parker Posey would be perfect. But it’s a role that any number of women could have a lot of fun with. Fiona’s fun because she’s tough as nails, smart, and has a kind of macho sexuality about her, but is also intensely vulnerable.
