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| Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox |
Russian-Jewish-German born immigrant turned Broadway theater
director Mike Nichols, one of twenty-one people to have won all four of the main
American entertainment awards from Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony (EGOT), was
already long considered a modern master of 1960s comedy following his debut
film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate decades
before hitting his stride in 1988 doling out two films within the same year Biloxi
Blues and the multiple Academy Award nominee romantic dramedy Working
Girl. Nominated for Best Picture,
Director, Actress and with two competing Supporting Actress nominations as well
as winner of the Best Original Song Oscar for Carly Simon’s Let the River
Run, the film is something of a spiritual successor to Colin Higgins’ 9
to 5 in terms of dramatizing the female office workplace experience only
this time the adversary doesn’t come in the form of a sleazy boorish man but a
conniving mercenary femme fatale.
While also ostensibly a comedy, Nichols’ film penned by Meet
Joe Black screenwriter Kevin Wade, shot by Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas cinematographer
Michael Ballhaus and aided by Carly Simon’s score co-authored by Rob Mounsey
gets into the cutthroat nature of being a successful businesswoman in a
dog-eat-dog world of Wall Street.
Dealing in the nebulous mechanics of acquisitions and mergers in the Staten
Island area, Working Girl tracks Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) who
takes the ferry boat to work everyday dreaming of ascending the corporate
ladder in a stockbroker office quits after tiring of fending off leering male
associates. After quitting, she lands a
new position at a merger firm as Katharine Parker’s (Sigourney Weaver) secretary
and very quickly learns following a skiing accident that her employer is trying
to steal one of her business ideas as her own, prompting an embittered Tess to
take matters into her own hands and push ahead with advancing her idea alongside
the help of Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) a firm manager who takes a liking to
Tess while fending off the nefarious talons of his ex-girlfriend who is none other
than Katharine herself.
A New Yorky Wall Street set comedy with Melanie Griffith and
Harrison Ford navigating the workplace as well as their own mutual growing romantic
relations, a snapshot of late 80s office culture stemming from screenwriter
Kevin Wade’s own experiences seeing office women walking the streets in tennis
shoes while carrying their high heels in hand and a career jump for its leading
lady, Working Girl is at once sweet natured and streetwise. A film still featuring and utilizing the
then-standing locale of the World Trade Center as well as a behind-the-scenes
rehabilitation effort for Griffith who herself was struggling with addiction
and partying mid-shoot which caused Mike Nichols to intervene, the film rests
largely on the big shoulders of Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver which dares
ask the question in moviegoers’ heads what kind of Alien and Star
Wars crossover might’ve been with Ripley and Han Solo traversing into each
other’s respective sci-fi universes. A
chance to see Sigourney Weaver as a villainess whose presence is all too
familiar to other women trying to get ahead in the workplace, using everything from
her sexuality to her intonation to how she dresses to get ahead.
Anchoring if not buoying her red-hot energies is Harrison
Ford in a role that is intended as everyman but might cause film buffs to
recall his own villainous turn in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation as
a well-dressed stalker. In addition to
the main leads, there are a wealth of cameos including Alec Baldwin as Tess’
sleazy cheating boyfriend, Nora Dunn prior to Three Kings as one of
Katharine’s cohorts, a young Oliver Platt, Olympia Dukakis, Ricki Lake and an
unforgettable bit with Kevin Spacey as a coked-up suit trying to worm his way
onto his subordinate Tess. Of course the
film would’ve have succeeded had Nichols not gone to bat for Melanie Griffith
who was affiliated with the part a year before shooting even began. While the studio was testing Molly Ringwald
in the part, Nichols threatened to pull out if they didn’t go with Griffith, a decision
20th Century Fox ultimately favoring Griffith’s casting. Relatively unknown at the time outside of Roar
and Body Double, the film garnered the actress her first Oscar
nomination as well as her first Golden Globe win for Best Actress.
Released around Christmas in 1988 to enormous critical
acclaim, the $28 million Wall Street office workplace drama raked in $103
million at the box office and became something of a beloved comedy favorite. Later dubbed one of ‘The Best Movies That
Lost Best Picture at the Oscars’ by New York Magazine, the film also was one of
two pictures that year to garner Sigourney Weaver an Academy Award nomination
(the other being Gorillas in the Mist).
Sometime in 1990, a 12-episode miniseries featuring Sandra Bullock in
the role of Tess came out on NBC television and in 2017 a Broadway musical-version
set to be scored by Cyndi Lauper percolated for awhile before fizzling out. Nichols himself carried on with the
female-driven workplace comedy with Postcards from the Edge before
reuniting with Harrison Ford once more on the drama Regarding Henry
while Melanie Griffith unfortunately got targeted by the Razzies over the
course of seven more times. Whatever you
make of that, it shouldn’t deter from the staying comic power and screen
presence of her time working for Mike Nichols in one of many solid cinematic
ventures doled out by the prolific former stage comedy director.
--Andrew Kotwicki
