Workplace comedies were a feature of the decade and this lesser-known charm­er begins with a pan up the skyscraper of the fictional Federal Broadcasting Net­work in midtown Manhattan, where a group of reference librarians are about to be replaced by the EMERAC (Electro­magnetic MEmory and Research Arith­metical Calculator) or the “Emmy.” This comedy romance featuring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was fittingly adapted by husband-wife screenwriting team Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron from a stage play by William March­ant, and as in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, you can feel the underpinning of sexual equality. One of the first films to address the fears of AI, this color and scope movie was directed by Walter Lang who had just won an Academy Award for his direction of the Yul Brynner mu­sical The King and I.

The opposition here is not so much boy vs girl as Bunny vs Emmy. Hepburn is Bunny Watson, a formidable brain who tosses off arcane facts with the greatest of ease as she heads up a group of researchers. Their job – now threatened by the arrival of Spen­cer Tracy, engineer and “efficiency expert” who’s there to install his prodigy – is to field questions on every conceivable topic as calls come in from the general public and from various organizations. The girls (Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill, Sue Randall) are not just good at looking up facts, but at trading quips and romantic advice. Such as whether Gig Young as Hepburn’s sometimes boyfriend is serious or not about marriage.

Bunny is a variation on Hepburn’s attractive spinsterish woman who’s not averse to love but has been too preoccu­pied to give it her full attention. Here Tracy brings out the feminine side, even a coy blush or two, as the slick suitor beats a retreat. There are delicious innu­endoes, fairly racy for a film under the Production Code. The two are old hands at this but it always seems fresh, tied to a new situation such as the love triangle… or is it (there’s Emmy in the background) a quadrangle?

Molly Haskell