Working Girl

Wonderful romance-comedy in the tradition of Capra and Sturges with Griffith perfectly cast as a woman posing as a business mogul to get ahead in the corporate world and spite bitchy boss Weaver, who is simply divine. Ford is especially precious in a rare romantic-comedy as Griffith's partner in business and love interest. The story is creative and witty. Mike Nichols' direction is sharp and in the highest form. The fine supporting cast also features Cusack and the always durable Phillip Bosco. Carly Simon's wonderful song won an Oscar.

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.

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.

"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