Thursday, December 30, 2010

Typewriters in the Movies

My wife and I went to the movies (a rare occurrence with a year old at home) to see The King's Speech with Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth. It was a wonderful movie. There is a scene where Geoffrey Rush's character, Lionel Logue, is seen using an Oliver.

Hepburn and Tracy in Desk Set
Another movie, while not specifically about typewriters, is about the conflict between the modern and the traditional. Spenser Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are hilarious in Desk Set (1954). Hepburn plays a reference librarian for a major television studio and Tracy is a computer scientist. When Tracy's character is hired to computerize the office, Hepburn's character matches wits and ultimately falls in love with the computer scientist. It is definitely a comedy film, but it crystallizes a time in the history of human experience when a paradigm was about to change. The digital age was gaining momentum and would soon change everything.