Working Girl

"Working Girl" is one of those movies I've put off for years; and I guess it's partly because I'd known it as a romantic comedy, but mostly because I've never been a Melanie Griffith fan.

Turns out she's the movie's best feature, fitting well as an ambitious secretary who can't get ahead, someone who takes the corporate ladder by force. Actually, all three of the stars were ideal, but Ford and Weaver seemed to be supporting Griffith. She just seemed to embody that empowered career woman who sheds her mousy constraints.

And it is a romantic comedy, but a subtle one. The humor is expressed in the dialogue and I found myself laughing more than I'd expected. It's an '80s movie down to its very DNA and pretty much everything about it still holds up.

7/10

80's at its peak. 80's at it's best. 80's in America. Big hair, big clothes, big dreams. Casting and directing great. Plot with a twist. Fun and watchable like it is expected from the 80's movie.

A pure fantasy served up by Mike Nichols, but a vastly entertaining one.

Melanie Griffith is the secretary with massive hair who pretends to be a corporate business woman when her boss is layed up with a broken leg. The catch is, she finds out she's pretty good at it, and things get complicated when she ends up spearheading a business deal and falling in love with her key partner (Harrison Ford), all the while trying to keep what she's doing from her boss (Sigourney Weaver). It's the kind of movie that could just as easily have been made as a screwball comedy in the 1940s, perhaps with Barbara Stanwyck in the lead role.

The film is a classic in its own small way, one of the best comedies to emerge from the 1980s. Griffith is matched well with her role, so her limitations as an actress don't draw too much attention to themselves. But it's Weaver who steals the show as Griffith's imperious boss. She's a riot as a confident and powerful career woman from hell. And Joan Cusack steals a few scenes of her own as Griffith's best friend and fellow secretary, who sports hair as big as Griffith's and a Joisy accent to boot.

Nichols knows how to direct a comedy so that the funny bits speak for themselves.

Grade: A

Because there's so much content out there and I'll never get through everything I want to see in my lifetime, to help me decide, I often segue from one actor, director, or theme to another. Mike Nichols was the bridge this past weekend for Super Saturday Cinema since I watched "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" recently and have seen "Closer", "Charlie Wilson's War", and "Postcards from the Edge" in the past few years.

. This is a movie of its time, still entertaining but also allowing for a bit of anthropological thinking about the 80s. There are many good elements that have survived the test of time (35 years!), including an excellent cast, a good story, a great director, and omigod, the hair! If anyone wonders whether women really wore their hair like that, they only need to look at my 1988 high dchool yearbook where every senior girl worth her salt had her hair Aqua-Netted to the gods.

This is an example of how to make fun and interesting characters that you can empathize with. It's something that today's entertainment industry has mostly forgotten about.

The film is fun, and the cast is not bad. Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver and Harrison Ford are a great combination. This is a true product of its time and as such is superior to most of today's films.

From the beginning, you sympathize with Tess McGill because the character is well written and not irritating, and the story is well balanced, with different characters, good and bad and those in between.

Sigourney Weaver is excellent in the role of the villain, and Melanie Griffith is great as Tess McGill, a secretary who wants to succeed in the business world.

In this film, not all women are saints, but women of flesh and blood, with their flaws and with whom you can sympathize, and men are the same, different, some are bad some are good, just like in real life.

An interesting and fun story with a good cast.