Katherine Hepburn (left), with Spencer Tracy (right) in the 1957 nerd romcom “Desk Set”
Last night, entirely on a whim I watched what turned out to be an eminently enjoyable 1957 nerd romcom “Desk Set”, starring the ever eminently watchable Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Until I found it accidently on hbogo.com I did not know such a film even existed. (Check out the trailer here: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2573009433/)
Even if I discount that serendipity accentuated some of my pleasure of watching the film, “Desk Set”, directed by Walter Lang, is a charming little nugget that does not get talked about much while discussing these two great artistes’ work together.
Tracy is a “methods engineer” (really a computer whiz, a PhD from the MIT) who has been contracted by a fictional television network Federal Broadcasting Company to computerize their reference department which is run with joyous efficiency by Hepburn. Hepburn’s all-knowing Bunny Watson was Google nearly five decades before Google was born and a million times more charming. She and her three female colleagues are a human search engine, fact checker and librarian, all rolled into four.
Tracy’s Richard Sumner is told by the network that he is being brought in to save them having to do a lot of menial work of physically searching references. The reality, of course, is more ruthless.
What struck me about the movie, apart from its smooth and witty passage, was the fact that it was probably among the first nerd romcoms and also how it presaged the way our lives would depend so much on the computer and its ability to do functions like search.
Towards the end of the film, as Hepburn and her colleagues are fired after Tracy installs IBM’s “electronic brain” there is a scene where Tracy wants the computer’s ability to be tested. He wants a question asked of it. Hepburn volunteers.
“How much damage is done annually to the American forests by the spruce budworm?”, she asks and answers:
“138,464,359 dollars and some cents.”
Tracy then checks her answer against the computer’s. It is 138,464,359 and 12 cents.
I fed the same question in Google search and got no specific answer except one which quoted from the movie. I was actually looking for how much damage is done annually to the American forests by the spruce budworm in 2011. I am sure the answer is there somewhere but it did not come up at once, although I am happy to report that there is indeed a spruce budworm which does seriously damage the American forests. If the spruce budworm had paid Google for keywords, it might have been on top of the list of answers.
