Desk Set

Desk Set
by Walter Lang

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DVD details

Actor: Dina Merrill, Gig Young, Joan Blondell, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy
Director: Walter Lang
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 103 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-04
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox

DVD Reviews of Desk Set

DVD Review: Huzzah!
Summary: 5 Stars

When I was a college student in Stony Brook, New York in 1974, I skipped a class one cold winter morning to stay in my dorm room and watch "Desk Set" on my roommate's black and white portable TV. It was a revelation. Since then I have graduated to watching it on DVD on my large screen color TV, and it continues to be a revelation. I won't repeat all the accolades of previous reviewers - who DOESN'T love the scene on the freezing rooftop or the floating island on a rainy night while Tracy's shoes are cooking in the oven? - but there are lots of delightful lesser moments, such as when Hepburn despairs of getting married and suggests to Blondell that they live together and keep cats (Gertrude Stein, anyone?) or when the continuity person didn't do their job, and Hepburn leaves the office building holding flowers of one color, and steps outside with the color completely changed.
A big part of the charm of this film, of course, is the obvious and genuine affection between Hepburn and Tracy. They truly enjoyed each other, and so do we.

DVD Review: Desk Set
Summary: 5 Stars

This is such a fun movie! I love the Hepburn/Tracy interactions; they were very familiar with one another's styles by the time they made this film and play off each other perfectly. The theme of the room-sized computer as a threat to everyone's job is also great fun to watch. It's hard to imagine computers were once so enormous!

DVD Review: A great romantic comedy with poor commentary track
Summary: 5 Stars

When I list my favorite film for each year, this is always on my list for 1957. I know I'm supposed to say "Twelve Angry Men" or "Bridge over the River Kwai", but I just find this film to be better. Hepburn and Tracy star in a very odd romantic comedy in which the leading man is a computer designer and the leading lady is head of the reference department at a major television network. Change the fear of automation that Tracy's computer brings to the fear of outsourcing and you have something very modern indeed. It is interesting to see the fear of being replaced by something cheaper existed for employees even 50 years ago. It's also interesting to see that Hepburn's character as well as her employees are all smart women who, in the 1950's, cannot hope to aspire to something greater than looking up information for the rest of the company. The romantic comedy is smart and very adult, and it's a shame more people haven't seen it. There really is romance after the age of 35, something you'd never know by watching the films of today.

The one real disappointment of this DVD is the commentary. There are two people commenting - film historian John Lee and actress Dina Merrill who costarred in the film. John Lee seems to be reading his remarks and talks more about film history in general than the film specifically. Ms. Merrill talks about her personal experiences with the cast. I was really hoping for some extra or commentary about research departments as they existed in the 1950's or even something about the early electronic brains, such as the one that Tracy's character brings into the network research department. You get none of that. There is one other extra about fashions, but that is it. Usually commentary and extras on Fox classic films has been much better than this.

DVD Review: A Tracy-Hepburn gem
Summary: 5 Stars

Buy this film! No, really, do it! It's a fine piece of comedy from Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn centered in the 1950s about automation in the work site. Both leads work fine together and, if you can catch it, ad-lib some of the dialogue. The supporting cast has not one weak link among them. Watch also for the running site gags (think, "Wandering Jew" plant). Unfortunately there is no commentary and few extras. Nevertheless this is a great film to add to your collection.

DVD Review: The Hepburn/Tracy Team is Timeless!!
Summary: 5 Stars

I saw this movie as a kid, and it remains as fresh and funny now as it was the first time I saw it! Snappy dialog and wonderful chemistry between the main characters. A snapshot of a period in time when computers were still several stories high and employees still clustered around the water cooler for news. As a reference librarian, I like the way the film portrays how research was done "back in the day," before the internet and email were available and librarians had to use print resources - and their brains - to disseminate information. Plus the movie is just plain fun!

Description of Desk Set

Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) heads up the research department at the Federal Broadcasting Company, a major TV network. And she does her job very well, thank you very much. Assigned by the network president to introduce computers into some of the department?s functions, Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) arrives at Bunny?s well-run division to observe daily activities. Unfortunately, however, Sumner is ordered to keep his mission secret. As a result, the whole staff believes they are being replaced. To make matters worse, there appears to be more than a little electricity between Bunny and Sumner, which upsets Bunny?s boyfriend Mike (Gig Young). As the tension mounts in the office, so do the laughs in this classic romantic comedy.

One of the later Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn matchups, this time pitting efficiency expert--sorry, that's "methods engineer"--Richard Sumner (Tracy) against TV-network research whiz Bunny Watson (Hepburn) over adding a new-fangled computer--again, sorry, that's "electronic brain"--to her department, thereby threatening her and her colleagues' livelihoods. Gig Young appears as Bunny's beau, an ambitious network executive who strings her along and becomes apoplectic at the idea that she doesn't need him. But as always, it's Hepburn and Tracy's bickering-flirting that makes this such a winning enterprise--a lunch date that turns into an interrogation and their sly repartee during a Christmas party are a couple of the movie's hilarious highlights. Interestingly, what starts out as something of a technophobic exercise--Hepburn fears for her job, and a computer goes haywire--takes an abrupt turn (perhaps the IBM product placement had something to do with that). Briskly scripted by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Nora and Delia's parents) from a play by William Marchant. --David Kronke

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