Desk Set

Director: Walter Lang
Year Released: 1957
Rating: 2.0

Empty, flat film (despite Technicolor!) with Tracy and Hepburn about a big corporation that hires M.I.T.-educated engineer (Tracy) to build a computer (they call it an "electronic brain") in the Research Dept. where Hepburn is the supervisor, and Hepburn and her colleagues begin to fear for their jobs. That drags on for a long time, with Tracy playing mute cigar-store Indian to Hepburn's suspicious spinster - he refuses to tell her whether or not her job will be eliminated; she, meanwhile, becomes paranoid and jittery. There's an obligatory love triangle in there, too, between Tracy, Hepburn and Gig Young, a smiling, cheery would-be suitor who never stepped forward to ask the question (in case you're wondering: she never marries him). This is completely flat - I kept waiting for the computer to blow up to rock its irritating calmness. And the moral at the end - that humans and computers can and should work together - is a little suspicious considering that in the opening credits the producers thank none other than IBM for their cooperation. Propaganda, you say?