December 9: Desk Set (1957)
Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn) is the manager of the library, and Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) is the mysterious outside business consultant who enters the workplace of the four women who run the show there. Bunny runs her her office quite democratically, as much as she can within her library, and all the women are quite competent already at their jobs, so the sudden appearance of Sumner hanging around is causing some anxiousness and gossip in the other departments in the network.
Bunny also has a love interest in the story when it begins, but it's not Sumner, but an ambitious executive upstairs, Mike Cutler (Gig Young), who is earnest but, because it is the fifties, we see how he can play Bunny like a violin (or when things get unsteady between them, bongos).
Great support comes from Joan Blondell as researcher Peg Costello, the one-woman Greek chorus who says just what we're thinking. I admit, I love these characters. Rounding out the library are Dina Merrill and Sue Randall who rely on Bunny for support for their jobs and their future at the network.
The big moment is the Christmas office party and the celebrating that seems to harken back to the ancient pagan roots. Christmas as celebrated by uprooted young and middle-aged Americans working in a corporate setting.
It does stand as an example of how things used to be in offices back in the Fifties and for that reason alone worth a look. Also, the themes of women and their standing in the workplace, the burgeoning computer business and its applications in the offices of large corporations, and the expense budgets and profitability of American companies in spite of the high tax era of the 1950's. Add to it an office Christmas party atmosphere that I have never witnessed personally in the days since Watergate.
The Art direction is this movie is wonderful. Watch for contrasts in the various offices- of the President of the network, Mr. Azae (Nicholas Joy) and the "girls" of the Research dept. -and the general clutter around Bunny Watson and how it slowly changes as her feelings about Richard Sumner change. It's not disorder but a mind filled with trivia that may become necessary at any given moment.
Then, after Christmas, EMERAC appears.