Unbelievably, Working Girl is 34 years old. As a teenager I went with a mate to see it. Not sure why we chose the Mike Nichols-helmed romantic dramedy instead of something starring Arnold Schwarzenegger but then I wasn’t your average 15 year old.
Back then I remember thinking it was baffling, unfunny and a bit long. The world of take-over crazy corporate New York was a long way from comprehensive school in North East England. I probably expected a laugh out loud comedy rather than a subtle take down of business and gender politics.
With time to waste one Tuesday night I watched it again on a whim.
In thousands of years, future historians will develop a technology that can play back long buried DVDs and Working Girl will give them a glimpse of a strange and colourful past. Working Girl is a 1980s time capsule now, that starts with Carly Simon warbling Let the River Run, a religiously influenced anthem for corporate America.
For a start, there is the hair. The hair in Working Girl is simply epic. Joan Cusack’s appears to be a free standing structure to rival the Twin Towers that loom over many of the movie’s location shots.
Then there’s the outfits, absolutely stunning stuff from Melanie Griffith who starts the film looking like something out of Whitesnake, all leather and white trainers, and finishes it in angular corporate black Armani with shoulder pads and white blouse.
Standing impassively above this 1980s riot of tasteless colour and accessorising is Harrison Ford. Timelessly stylish and ridiculously good looking in a plain grey suit and with an unmistakeable screen presence.
In fact Working Girl serves to remind just what an accomplished leading man Harrison Ford is. He handles what for him was an unusual non-action role, with aplomb.
Meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver chews the scenery as the woman who has it all, including Harrison, and is determined to bring down plucky Tess, the working class ambitious ingenue.
Working Girl is known for its gender politics, as a film that addressed what would later become the hashtag MeToo culture – check out a young Kevin Spacey sexually harassing Tess in an eerily prescient scene. But what’s also fascinating about Working Girl is its class politics.
This is a film about Tess moving away from her New Jersey roots and disrupting an elite. It’s about someone literally crossing a vast river to world of shiny sky scrapers and corporate takeovers. Her journey leaves her a stranger to her working class friends who choose marriage and security over sheer ambition.
As Carly sings as a helicopter shot zooms over a packed Staten Island ferry heading towards the World Trade Centre – ‘Let all the dreamers wake the nation, come the new Jerusalem’.
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