Working Girl (1988)

Working Girl arrives from 1988 carrying a briefcase full of ambition and a Staten Island accent it cannot quite shake. Melanie Griffith plays Tess McGill, a secretary with a night-school business degree and a boss who steals her merger idea and then breaks her leg skiing, which is the sort of plot convenience that exists only in movies about women who deserve better. Mike Nichols directs with the smooth, unbothered competence of a man who knows exactly which buttons to press. The film's central engine is a woman fighting sexist gatekeepers for credit that is rightfully hers. This is female empowerment as narrative spine, not decoration.

The class resentment is present but polite. Staten Island against Manhattan, sneakers against heels, the secretary who reads the room better than the partners who ignore her. Yet the film never turns its gaze toward the system itself. Tess does not want to dismantle the merger-and-acquisitions machine. She wants a desk inside it, preferably with a window. The makeover sequence, in which she borrows her hospitalized boss's wardrobe, treats transformation as a matter of tailoring and borrowed blazers. Conventional beauty standards are not questioned here. They are accessorized.

What the film does not do is equally instructive. Its corporate Manhattan is uniformly white, and race never enters the frame as a subject. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental conscience, no curiosity about neurodivergence, no interest in bodies that deviate from the sample size. The message about women and work is real and it is central, but it travels through romantic-comedy mechanics, through Harrison Ford being charming in a towel, through the reliable rhythm of a third-act rescue. The sermon is there. It is simply wearing a power suit and asking us to admire the cut.