Working Girl

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.

Watching Working Girl ten years after its release, it's hard not to dismiss it as a dated satire of the corporate world of the 1980's. At the same time, that's part of the movie's charm. Even though ten years has made the costumes, hair, and production design irritating, the charm and intelligence of Mike Nichols' Cinderella story still shine through. As does the quality of the performances, which are also revealing a decade later. Harrison Ford makes a perfectly likable romantic lead while Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey offer amusingly smarmy comic performances. But the actresses walk away with the movie. Joan Cusack is hilarious in a scene-stealing turn as a Staten Island secretary, and Sigourney Weaver is great as a shrewd and conniving career woman. The brilliance of Weaver's performance is how slyly and genuinely she plays her villianous character, often decieving the audience as she decieves the characters in the movie. And finally there is Melanie Griffith who gave a star-is-born performance as the big-haired secretary who falls in love with Ford's merger specialist and smartly climbs her way up the corporate ladder after Weaver stabs her in the back. Griffith earned an Oscar nod for this performance (as did Cusack and Weaver for theirs) and it's a testament to how funny, sexy, and wonderful she is in the part that even after numerous flops and odd career moves, she's still a well-known movie star ten years later (For an opposite side at this scenario look at Jennifer Beals in Flashdance or Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing, both of whom became big stars and then fell off the face of the earth). Nichols' direction is smart, as is Kevin Wade's clever screenplay, and the light and funny romantic comedy leads up to a surprisingly suspenseful and enormously satisfying climax. All-in-all, a satisfying and amusing entertainment.

Although the 60s and 70s are thought of as the age of feminism, it wasn't really until the 80s that women really achieved a bit of equality in movie land. But this being a less radical time, the dramas about powerful women tended to be a synthesis of Women's Lib and Reagan era entrepreneurial optimism. This is after all what success meant in that decade. But of-its-time as it is, Working Girl is still an entertaining and uplifting picture.

Written by Kevin Wade, Working Girl is a nice, neatly-constructed story. On a broad level it could be seen a black-and-white tale of good guys and bad guys. But what saves the characters from appearing one-dimensional is that they are written with a great deal of knowing realism. Who hasn't worked for a boss like Sigourney Weaver's character, or been cheated on by a jerk like Alec Baldwin's? One thing that keeps Working Girl engaging is that, while not an out-and-out comedy it is often tentatively funny in the way that real life is funny, such as Alec Baldwin's futile claim that "This isn't what it looks like".

The effectiveness of Working Girl often hinges on the way its characters are projected. On paper, Tess McGill isn't necessarily sympathetic, and neither is Katherine Parker necessarily unpleasant, at least not in the first half of the movie. However, Melanie Griffith portrays the lead with enough drive to appear credible as a go-getter, but all wrapped in a kind of sensitive charm that makes her likable. It's lucky she didn't inherit her mother's steeliness. And Sigourney Weaver manages to convey a smug and patronising manner that is only hinted at in the script, but never quite overdoing it so it is still believable that Griffith initially warms to her. Harrison Ford is at his best too, moulding the role round his limited range by giving a business-world version of his usual level-headed action hero type.

If you're a fan of the look of this era, Working Girl will be a real treat for the eyes – everything from glorious cityscapes to pouffy dresses. I'm glad director Mike Nichols puts such an emphasis on places and props, without loosing sight of the people of course. The changing fashions of the decade are even woven into the movie's themes, as Griffith swaps her hairsprayed bouffant and dangly bangles for an elegant, simple look. Working Girl is an incredibly 80s movie, but it's also the death of 80s extravagance we're witnessing there on screen. Of course, she still wears a pair of pink glasses with rims the size of beermats, but there you go. 80s extravagance died hard.

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.

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