Desk Set

Katherine Hepburn is Bunny Watson, the brilliant head reference librarian with a photographic memory at a major television network in New York. She and her team of impressive librarians excel at finding answers to every imaginable question thrown at them by the network staff—that is, until they're threatened by the arrival of computer engineer Richard Sumner (Tracy). As he scopes out the department, he reveals his plan to install a new electronic brain (loosely based on UNIVAC) called the EMERAC, the Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator. This penultimate Hepburn and Tracy film is more a battle-of-wits-turned-romance than it is a tale of man vs. machine. Directed by Walter Lang (The King and I), Desk Set was adapted by Phoebe and Henry Ephron from William Marchant’s 1955 play of the same name.