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Working Girl (1988)
In director Mike Nichols' Best Picture-nominated modern
farcical romantic comedy about the workplace and corporate culture
in the 1980s:
- the breathtaking, rotating opening shot of the Statue
of Liberty as the Oscar-winning Carly Simon song "Let the
River Run" played
- the character of Tess McGill (Oscar-nominated Melanie
Griffith) - a smart, free-thinking, slightly ditzy 30 year old
ingenue, a "working girl" secretary-receptionist in
a Wall Street brokerage firm with upwardly-mobile ambitions;
she lived in working class Staten Island and each day took the
ferry to work; she was the film's central Cinderella character
striving to make it in the corporate world
- Tess was unknowingly manipulated by her icy, sleek,
intimidating, elitist super-boss Katherine Parker (Oscar-nominated
Sigourney Weaver)
- Katharine as a mentor
instructed Tess to follow her example: "Tess, you know you don't
get anywhere in this world by waiting for what you want to come to
you. You make it happen. Watch me, Tess. Learn from me"
- the flirtatious and provocative
line of dialogue in a bar during a business function, typical of
the yuppie-life style of the 1980s, delivered by Tess to handsome
investment broker Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford in his first light
comedy) with a deadpan personality: "I
have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong
with that?"
- Tess found herself betrayed by her unfaithful, scumbag
live-in boyfriend Mick Dugan (Alec Baldwin), and by her double-crossing,
morally-corrupt, conniving, breezy and duplicitous boss Katharine
who took Tess' business idea for a media merger and passed it off
as her own. Tess took the situation under her control and brokered
the deal herself, along with her love interest Jack Trainer (at one-time,
Katharine's boyfriend)
- the brilliant final pull-back shot of the triumphant
Tess in her office, revealing her to be just one of thousands
in a single building in the whole of New York City, as the subtly
subversive lyrics of "Let the River Run" undercut the
moment
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