Nice Work If You Can Get It: Office Romances on Film

Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female typists. The film then begins with a smooth tracking shot past rows of desks where smartly dressed young women are working, in the kind of bright, spacious modern office—with its cheerful hubbub of phones and buzzers and clacking keys, its art-deco lettering on nameplates and pebbled-glass doors—that was one of 1930s Hollywood’s favorite settings, especially for romantic comedies. The combination is natural: who hasn’t harbored a crush on a coworker or indulged in a workplace flirtation?

It was the invention of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century that first brought women into the white-collar workplace in large numbers. In films such as the selection of Office Romances now streaming on the Criterion Channel, Hollywood grappled—sometimes clumsily or ambivalently, sometimes daringly, sometimes frivolously—with what heterosexual relationships might look like in a world where women are no longer relegated to the home, where they might be men’s colleagues, their rivals, or even their bosses. The genre is also, in a profoundly American way, about the romance of work itself. It captures the sounds and textures, the joys and frustrations, of the daily routine, and the glories and pitfalls of building one’s identity around professional achievement. Asked how she can endure the long hours and endless demands of her job, a magazine editor played by Kay Francis in Man Wanted (1932) beams, “It’s all in the game—and I love it!”

In Conference

Set in a publishing company, The Office Wife opens with an editor, Larry Fellowes (Lewis Stone), meeting with one of his authors, a middle-aged woman (played by Blanche Friderici) who sports man-tailored clothes and cropped hair and smokes a cigar. He suggests that she write a series of articles on the proposition that “the modern businessman’s secretary is closer to him than his wife.” Oddly, the elegant, silver-haired Fellowes seems oblivious to the fact that his efficient but plain secretary (Dale Fuller) is in love with him, until she faints, and then quits, upon learning that he is getting married. Proving his own theory, Larry is soon spending more time and getting along better with his new assistant, Anne (Dorothy Mackaill)—who is both efficient and lovely—than with his high-society wife, who responds to his neglect by taking a lover. Based on a 1930 novel of the same name by Faith Baldwin, The Office Wife tempers its Cinderella plot with a dose of Depression-era cynicism. This is mostly injected by Joan Blondell, as Anne’s wised-up sister, who works as a dress model and pragmatically accepts that her position depends on tolerating a certain amount of her boss’s pawing. (Workplace sexual harassment was frankly exposed in Hollywood movies long before it became the subject of scandals, laws, and corporate policies.) Blondell, making her talkie debut here, would become one of Warner’s hardest-working stars in the thirties, bringing a reliable radiance and sweet-tart fizz to every single appearance.

Two years later, Warner Bros. thriftily recycled the same story with a gender reversal: in Man Wanted, David Manners is the secretary whose loyalty, tireless energy, and pretty face endear him to his boss, Lois Ames (Francis), who runs a magazine called the 400. The film opens with a receptionist insisting that Ames cannot see anyone because she is “in conference”: a cut reveals her conference to be a desktop smooching session with her husband, an idle polo player who can’t fathom why she relishes her job. Not surprisingly, she soon has even better chemistry with a man who respects and shares her appetite for work and toils constantly by her side. Both versions of this story reveal that it is not only since the advent of email and cell phones that professionals have been expected to work late nights and weekends, and during vacations. Not that dictating letters while lounging by the pool, or talking over editorial decisions in a palatial hotel suite at a summer resort, looks terribly stressful; handsomely directed by William Dieterle and shot by Gregg Toland, the whole film has a frictionless sheen. At home in these sleek settings, the eternally soignée Kay Francis could not be further from the stereotype of the high-powered woman as joyless, driven, and brittle. She has the warm, easy luster of someone truly satisfied by doing a good day’s work.

Arthur plays something almost like a double role herself in More Than a Secretary (1936). Faced with a nice-looking man, she turns on a dime from a capable, tart-tongued professional to a lovelorn, mooning schoolgirl. Her character, bespectacled Carol Baldwin, runs a secretarial school with her friend and roommate, played by the redoubtable Ruth Donnelly. The film opens with the two teachers instructing classrooms full of young women hammering away at their typewriters. They roll their eyes in despair over one student who, when chided for her poor work and lazy attitude, explains that she is only looking for opportunities to “meet a nice man.” The school is not a matrimonial agency, the owners insist, to which the student, Maisie, retorts, “That’s what you think.”

Maisie (Dorothea Kent) is a one-dimensional foil to Carol: a baby-faced, baby-talking blonde whose cute-but-dumb persona and shameless flattery work on men like hypnosis. Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls (1931) presents a far more nuanced picture of two blondes, in this case sisters named Mae and June, who arrive in New York devoid of any education or skills and stumble into jobs for which they are vastly underqualified, while getting entangled with three very different men. The screenplay, by Zoë Akins, was adapted from a 1930 play called Blind Mice, by Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan. With so many women involved in its creation, you might expect a celebration of female independence and capability; instead, the film is a realistic portrait of precarity and confusion. These girls do not work because they want to but because they have to, and they are vulnerable to both romantic illusions and the hardnosed assumption that security lies in latching on to a well-heeled man. If one is lucky, he might also be nice.

Five years later, in More Than a Secretary, this pre-Code frankness is replaced by a fanciful Hollywood version of Depression-era America in which jobs are easy to come by, and to walk away from. The plot’s premise, initially, seems far-fetched. Mistaken for an applicant for a secretarial position, Carol spontaneously goes along with the mix-up because she fancies the boss, Fred Gilbert. (He is played by George Brent, whose lack of charm never stopped him from being inexplicably cast as an irresistible heartthrob.) Gilbert is the editor of a health magazine called Body and Brain, and the film amusingly satirizes its culture of mandatory office calisthenics, fresh air, and raw carrots. Carol, a steak-and-martini gal, is appalled by this but so savvy that she has soon boosted circulation and been promoted to associate editor. She understands what readers want: entertainment, with a soupcon of sex. Journalism, with its high-pressure deadlines, circulation wars, and storytelling sizzle, is in Hollywood movies the most romantic of professions, and perhaps an allegory for moviemaking itself.

Office Politics

In His Girl Friday (1940), journalism is a contact sport and conversation a speed event. One of the most exhilarating of all romantic comedies, the film is set in a series of drab, generic interiors: a newspaper office, a restaurant, a courthouse pressroom, and a jail cell. When Howard Hawks directed the second film adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s seminal newspaper drama The Front Page, he and screenwriter Charles Lederer did nothing at all to “open out” the stage play—yet few movies crackle with more electric energy or move at a more frenetic pace. What Hawks did change was the gender of reporter Hildy Johnson, so that the story of unscrupulous editor Walter Burns trying to inveigle his star writer into coming back to work on the paper became also the story of an ex-husband trying to win back the wife who divorced him and is planning to marry a stodgy insurance salesman and settle down in Albany.

If they are two of a kind, the couple in Woman of the Year (1942) are opposites who attract. Sam Craig and Tess Harding work for the same newspaper (the fictional New York Chronicle), but he is a down-to-earth sportswriter and she is a highflying, globe-trotting political columnist. After she speaks dismissively of baseball on a radio program, they spar in print, but strike sparks the moment they meet. This was the first on-screen encounter between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn: in their legendary meet-cute, Sam walks into an office to see Tess perched on a desk, mid-laugh, extending one slender leg to adjust her stocking. They proceed to flirt through interoffice memos. She has a bigger and fancier office, where he—pushing past her officious male secretary—barges in to find her with her shapely feet up on a desk, talking on the phone in Spanish to Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. He proposes to her in the wire room, amid the tap-tap-tapping of incoming news items. Both adore their work.

Hepburn and Tracy would make several more films where they are brought together by professional activities: in Adam’s Rib (1949), they are married lawyers who wind up on opposite sides of a case; in Pat and Mike (1952), she is an athlete and he is her coach; and in Desk Set (1957), discussed below, they cross paths in a broadcasting company. Woman of the Year is firmly populist: Tess must learn to appreciate America’s national pastime, but Sam is never required to get up to speed on foreign affairs. After the two marry, the film’s attitude toward her shifts gradually from awe tinged with light mockery to disapproval mixed with pity. That she is forced to demonstrate at excruciating length her inability to cook breakfast can be written off as dated (this ending was rewritten and reshot, against the wishes of the two primary screenwriters, Ring Lardner Jr., and Michael Kanin, after initial test screenings), but a subplot in which she adopts a European war orphan only to neglect him feels far more punitive and at odds with the warm, self-aware woman we’ve met. Fortunately, the rapport between Hepburn and Tracy rises above clumsy gender politics, and director George Stevens knows how to make the most of it. He proves here, as he would again in The More the Merrier (1943) and A Place in the Sun (1951), that no Hollywood filmmaker was better at bottling the elusive lightning of romantic chemistry.

Office Parties

By the mid- to late 1950s, workplace films had taken a heavier turn, with dramas about organization men—and women—clawing their way up the corporate ladder (e.g., Executive Suite, The Best of Everything, A Woman’s World). In The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder captures all the sleaze of this soulless world, where men compete for the key to the executive washroom and their pick of secretaries, while working girls settle for menial jobs and trysts with married men. Yet Wilder spins from this an enchanting romantic comedy about two people who, against all odds, wrest back their humanity.

The opening of The Apartment pays homage to King Vidor’s silent masterpiece The Crowd (1928), with the camera moving up the side of a skyscraper and entering a window to survey a vast sea of desks lined up in rows. The great art director Alexandre Trauner designed the set for Wilder’s film using forced perspective to make it extend into what seems like infinity, emphasizing the dronelike insignificance of the man seated at one of these desks: accountant C. C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who stumbles onto a path to career advancement by lending his apartment to higher-ups in his company for their extramarital affairs. Baxter is a man trying his best to conform to a crass and shamelessly sexist culture—fighting not to preserve his decency but to bury it. His moral journey from schnook to mensch turns on the discovery that Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the elevator operator he hopelessly adores, is the girl his boss has been bringing to the apartment—where she attempts suicide in despair over their dead-end relationship. MacLaine’s bracing wit complicates Fran’s victimhood: she is a woman who seems to stand outside herself, commenting wryly on her own pathos.

Like perfectly mixed martinis (of which Baxter downs some dozen during the most hilariously depressing Christmas Eve in cinema), the film goes down so smoothly and induces such giddy intoxication that it is easy to overlook the feat that Wilder and cowriter I. A. L. Diamond pull off in balancing cynicism with warmth and comedy with near-tragedy. They leave open the question of whether Bud and Fran are in thrall to the empty promises of success, money, marriage, and the suburban family, or whether they see their world for what it is and pragmatically decide to play along. There is no joy in the repetitive, meaningless work they do, only a frenzied pursuit of pleasure. The Apartment’s orgiastic company holiday party is emblematic of its complicated layering of tones. In the midst of the delirious excess—the scene is drawn with the springy, satirical lines of a Hirschfeld caricature—comes a shattering moment of truth.

Another boozy, anything-goes holiday party with melancholy undertones comes in Desk Set, an underrated delight among the Hepburn-Tracy pairings. The film’s central premise makes it timely: Tracy plays a consultant, Richard Sumner, who is brought in by a broadcasting corporation to assess whether the work of the reference department could be done by a computer. This department is one of the most attractive workplaces ever to appear in a movie: a comfortable, well-loved space cluttered with books, plants, and camaraderie. It is staffed by three women (one of them played by Joan Blondell, still a working girl twenty-seven years after making The Office Wife) and run by Bunny Watson (Hepburn), whose prodigious brain and breezy competence are matched by humor and a touch of flamboyant panache. This is one film in which Hepburn is never required to humble herself or be taken down a peg.