Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn team up in their penultimate film together, a comedy about an efficiency expert who inserts himself into the daily workings of a television network to make a clandestine examination of its research department.
Hepburn, as Bunny Watson, the head of the department, works with Peg Costello (Joan Blondell), Sylvia Blair (Dina Merrill), and Ruthie Saylor (Sue Randall). The four women have good chemistry on screen, which is more than one can say for the Hepburn-Tracy connection. The fault for that can be laid at the feet of Tracy, whose character, Gordon Sumner, is played with indifference and aloofness. Bunny, on the other hand, is engaging, funny, and full of energy. The viewer almost hopes that she can rehab her failing relationship with corporate man Mike Cutler (Gig Young)-a "suitor" who likes to maintain their no-strings approach to dating, but still shows more interest and ardor than Gordy, the dispassionate data driver.
The script is really about the prospect of AI displacing humans in the workforce, but it also seems to have something to say about living life in the moment-a message that is lost on Sumner, who seems content with viewing rather than doing.
The depiction of the digital age that's coming, personified by the mega-computer EMERAC, is satisfactorily cartoonish and unsophisticated, which is appropriate for audiences of the 50s. For a personification that is more worrisome, check out HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey", for example.
Hepburn, as Bunny Watson, the head of the department, works with Peg Costello (Joan Blondell), Sylvia Blair (Dina Merrill), and Ruthie Saylor (Sue Randall). The four women have good chemistry on screen, which is more than one can say for the Hepburn-Tracy connection. The fault for that can be laid at the feet of Tracy, whose character, Gordon Sumner, is played with indifference and aloofness. Bunny, on the other hand, is engaging, funny, and full of energy. The viewer almost hopes that she can rehab her failing relationship with corporate man Mike Cutler (Gig Young)-a "suitor" who likes to maintain their no-strings approach to dating, but still shows more interest and ardor than Gordy, the dispassionate data driver.
The script is really about the prospect of AI displacing humans in the workforce, but it also seems to have something to say about living life in the moment-a message that is lost on Sumner, who seems content with viewing rather than doing.
The depiction of the digital age that's coming, personified by the mega-computer EMERAC, is satisfactorily cartoonish and unsophisticated, which is appropriate for audiences of the 50s. For a personification that is more worrisome, check out HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey", for example.