Working Girl

Mike Nichols’s beloved workplace comedy turned thirty last year, which is around the age that his prototypical career woman was in the film. Melanie Griffith stars as Tess McGill, a secretary whose working-class Staten Island origins are betrayed by her rubber-banded desk folders and her amazement at the concept of an open bar. To get to the top, Tess must betray her ice-queen boss, Katharine Parker—played to perfection by Sigourney Weaver—by impersonating her while Parker is in the hospital. It’s a cinderella story with a slippery grasp of feminism; the whole conceit being that there’s only one seat for a woman at the corporate table, and that in order to get to it, you must take out the woman in that seat instead of making more room. But this seems pretty true to how it must’ve felt at the time. Other dated elements, including the shoulder pads, guazy sunset hues, and a young Harrison Ford in a suit, are a pleasure to take in.