Desk Set

Based on the Broadway play by Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr, Desk Set is the sixth screen teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, the head of a TV network research department; Tracy plays Richard Sumner, an efficiency expert hired to modernize Watson's operation. When Sumner has a huge computer installed, Watson and her co-workers (including Joan Blondell and Sue Randall) fear that they're going to lose their jobs. Their suspicions are confirmed when the computer merrily begins issuing pink termination slips. Something is obviously amiss: the computer not only fires the ladies, but also the head of the network, and Sumner, who isn't even on the company payroll! Summer explains that the computer was designed to help Watson and her staff and not replace them; he also confesses that, given the pink-slip incident, this might not have been such a hot idea. Watson, who has fallen in love with Sumner, is in just the right mood to forgive him. This would be the next-to-last Hepburn/Tracy pairing; they would reunite one last time onscreen in 1967's Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.