Working Girl

When a secretary’s idea is stolen by her boss, she seizes an opportunity to steal it back by pretending she has her boss’s job.

• Director: Mike Nichols
• Genre:Comedy / Drama / Romance
• Runtime:113 minutes

Cast

Harrison Ford : Jack Trainer
Sigourney Weaver: Katharine Parker
Melanie Griffith: Tess McGill
Alec Baldwin : Mick Dugan
Joan Cusack : Cyn

Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is an intelligent, working-class secretary, at a firm called Petty Marsh, who has recently earned a bachelor’s degree in Business by attending college at night. Her goal is to move out of the secretarial pool and into an executive position. As she turns 30, her dream remains unrealized; because her education was not acquired at a prestigious school, she cannot gain entry to her firm’s training program for recent college graduates. After being misled into thinking that her boss, David Lutz (Oliver Platt), is helping her get a better job, Tess finds herself set up as a sexual plaything for one of his sleazy friends, Bob Speck (Kevin Spacey); she then gets into trouble by publicly calling her boss a “sleazoid pimp with a tiny little dick”.

Tess is reassigned as secretary to a new financial executive, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). Seemingly supportive and benevolent, Katharine encourages Tess to share any good business ideas she has. Tess suggests to Katharine that Trask Industries, one of the firm’s clients, should invest in Metro Radio, so it can gain more of a foothold in the media market. When Katharine seems interested, Tess begins to feel her luck is finally changing. However, when Katharine breaks her leg on a skiing trip in Europe, she asks Tess to house-sit for her. While at Katharine’s place, Tess accidentally finds evidence that Katharine was planning to steal Tess’s idea and pass it off as her own. That night, when Tess returns home, she finds her boyfriend Mick Dugan (Alec Baldwin) in bed with another woman, Doreen DiMucci (Elizabeth Whitcraft). Disillusioned with Katharine and disgusted with Mick, she returns to Katharine’s apartment and begins to hatch her own plan.

The next day, Tess calls Dewey Stone executive Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), using her boss’s name as an entree. She tells Jack that she has a proposal to run by him and sets up a meeting. The evening before the meeting, Tess attends a merger party, wearing a sophisticated new hairstyle and an expensive cocktail dress from Katharine’s closet, which she models beforehand for her friend Cynthia (Joan Cusack), called “Cyn”. To calm her nerves, she accepts a Valium from Cyn.

At the party, she unknowingly encounters Jack, who never mentions his name, and has a few drinks with him, but Tess passes out thanks to the combination of alcohol and pills. Jack takes her to his place in a cab; Tess wakes up the next morning in Jack’s bed wearing only her underwear and leaves before Jack awakens. On entering the meeting, she realizes that Jack is the man with whom she spent the night. She submits her proposal to him but his colleagues seem uninterested. Returning to her own office, Tess cries to Cyn that she at least gave it a shot and is mortified about the previous evening. Jack then arrives at the office and Cyn (at Tess’s frantic request) pretends to be Tess’s secretary. Jack announces that they will proceed with Tess’s pitch. Read more

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