Working Girl (20th Century-Fox, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third item on my husband Charles’s and my Turner Classic Movies Academy Award marathon last Sunday, February 16 was Working Girl, a quite good and engaging romantic comedy starring Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill, a brassy young office secretary who lives on Staten Island and takes the Staten Island Ferry every morning to commute to work in Manhattan. Tess also doesn’t want to be a secretary all her life; she’s taking five years of business courses in night school and also going to voice training to shed her ineradicable Brooklyn accent. Griffith was only billed third in this film, after Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver (who was also briefly in Annie Hall as a woman Alvy Singer dates during one of his and Annie’s break-ups), but it’s really her movie. The opening reels of Working Girl come off as a #MeToo movie about a decade early, as Tess is determined to break out of the secretarial pool and show off her potential chops as an investment broker, only she ends up in the back of a limo with a lecherous executive named Lutz (Oliver Platt). Lutz couldn’t be less interested in anything Tess has to say about business; the only thing he cares about is getting into her pants, and after he tries to open a bottle of champagne in the limo and spills it all over her dress, she gets fed up, spritzes Lutz all over with what’s left of the champagne, demands that his driver stop the car, and gets out in high dudgeon. She steps out in the rain with no overcoat on and wearing only high-heeled shoes on her feet (earlier she’d been seen whipping off the tennis shoes she wore when she rode on the Staten Island Ferry and putting on her heels as the footwear she’s expected to wear at work), and she’s in the middle of a driving rainstorm, made even worse when a passing driver zips through a puddle and splashes dirty water all over her. Tess goes to her employment counselor (Olympia Dukakis) and gets told in no uncertain terms that she’s run out of opportunities, and if this next job doesn’t work out for her, there’s no future for her, at least as far as office work in New York City goes.

Tess’s next employer is Trask and Company big-shot executive Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), and Tess breathes a sigh of relief that at least her new boss will be a woman and therefore she won’t hit on her (though I wondered if writer Kevin Wade was going to pull the gag of having Katharine turn out to be a Lesbian predator after Tess’s warm young flesh; fortunately, he didn’t go there). Katharine insists to Tess that she’ll always have her back and will give her full credit for any ideas she brings, and to absolutely no one’s surprise except Tess’s that turns out not to be true. Katharine has a hot, studly client named Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) who represents a company that’s being targeted for a hostile takeover by a Japanese company. Trainer’s bosses have decided that the way to defend themselves against the Japanese corporate raiders is to buy a U.S. TV station, since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doesn’t allow non-U.S. citizens to hold American broadcast licenses. (Rupert Murdoch got around this regulation by simply re-nationalizing as a naturalized U.S. citizen.) But all the available TV stations are simply too expensive. Tess hits on the idea that Trainer’s company could buy a radio network, since radio stations are a lot cheaper and are still covered by the same FCC regulations against foreign ownership as TV stations. But she discovers a note on one of Katharine’s dictation tapes that she’s going to go ahead with the radio recommendation but keep Tess out of the loop so she can steal Tess’s idea and get all the credit for it. Fortunately for Tess, Katharine is laid up by a skiing accident that lands her in a Caribbean hospital for weeks, and Tess pursues the deal, posing as a bigshot executive on her own and meeting with the directors of Trainer’s company. She also gets the hots for Trainer, whom she meets at a party being hosted by Trainer’s executives and gets cruised by him without either of them knowing who the other is. Tess wakes up the next morning in Trainer’s bed, though he assures her that nothing sexual happened between them (a flashback to the old days of the Production Code!).

Eventually the negotiations zoom in on a radio network based in the South and owned by an old man, Armbrister (Robert Easton), who’s fierce about maintaining family ownership, though his kids couldn’t care less. There’s a rival bidder, but Tess manages to charm Armbrister into doing the deal with her – only Katharine arrives back unexpectedly and crashes the meeting where the deal is supposed to be finalized. We also learn, as does Tess, that Jack Trainer has been Katharine’s secret boyfriend all these months, so there’s personal as well as professional jealousy between Katharine and Tess. Katharine immediately fires Tess and she goes back to her office to collect her things – only Trainor runs into her in the hallway. Things get saved for our Nice Girl from Staten Island when she runs across a newspaper article about how the Southern radio network is about to lose its key talent, a typical Right-wing shock jock whose political program is by far the most popular show on its stations. Tess does the deal on her terms and is rewarded by her company’s owner, Oren Trask (Philip Bosco), with an entry-level position in mergers and acquisitions. There are also subplots involving Tess’s best friend from Staten Island, Cyn (Joan Cusack); her boyfriend Bob Speck (a young Kevin Spacey); Tess’s own boyfriend, Mick Dugan (a young Alec Baldwin); and Doreen DiMucci (Elizabeth Whitcraft), whom Tess catches having extra-relational activity with Mick in their own bed. Mick proposes to Tess and Tess says, “Maybe,” but in the end he and Doreen get together after Doreen catches the bouquet at Bob’s and Cyn’s wedding. Eventually Tess gets both her well-to-do dream man and her dream job, though there’s a peculiar little scene at the end in which Tess meets her own secretary in her new job, and we’re not sure whether her secretary will remain loyal or will turn out to be an Eve Harrington-style bitch out to do to Tess what Tess did to Katharine.

There’s a lot of The Solid Gold Cadillac in Working Girl and also a fair amount of Pretty Woman, but I enjoyed it as a neat little rom-com with a Cinderella twist, expertly directed by Mike Nichols from Wade’s quite charming (if a bit predictable) script. Though it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Griffith and Best Supporting Actress for both Weaver and Cusack, the only Oscar it won was for Carly Simon’s stunning song, “Let the River Run,” which not only is sung on the soundtrack by Simon at both the beginning and end but was used as the basis for Rob Mounsey’s underscoring. I remembered buying the cassette single of the song back when this movie was new, and playing it often, even though I hadn’t actually seen the film until last night, and it won Simon not only the Academy Award for Best Song but also a Golden Globe and a Grammy – the first time a single person had won for the same song in all three categories.