Before the term “glass ceiling” really entered into the popular lexicon, 1980’s 9 to 5
tapped into the roiling undercurrent of feminine workplace discord in
telling the comedic story of three women who team up to put the screws
to their patronizing, deceitful bastard of a boss. It may seem like
nothing in hindsight, but the savvy in-triplicate casting of Jane Fonda (also a producer on
the project), Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin represented significant
shifts or steps forward for each of them, and the movie as a whole definitely benefits from
the starkly contrasting pleasures of their rich interplay.
,<br />
from a story by Patricia Resnick, the film is set at dreary<br />
Consolidated, a faceless company where Violet Newstead (Tomlin) is<br />
stuck in a dead-end job under a boss that she trained. That<br />
middle-management lothario is Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), and he’s<br />
spread rumors that he’s having an affair with his folksy secretary<br />
Doralee Rhodes (Parton), despite the fact that she’s spurned his<br />
advances. Fonda plays Judy Brenly, a newly divorced new hire hidden<br />
behind a beehive hairdo and huge glasses. As she acclimates to the<br />
office, Judy sees how Franklin takes advantage of his “girls,” making<br />
them run personal errands and just generally denigrating them.</p>
<p>The women bond, especially once Judy and Violet discover Doralee<br />
isn’t Franklin’s mistress, and one evening laughingly daydream of<br />
bumping him off. After an accident sends him to the hospital for real,<br />
though, and Franklin’s toadie Roz (Elizabeth Wilson) overhears the<br />
gals’ complicity in the mishap, Franklin tries to blackmail Doralee<br />
into sleeping with him and, once that backfires, goes to call the<br />
police. In a comical escalation, the women kidnap Franklin and keep him<br />
tied up and under house arrest while they work to uncover his illegal<br />
money-laundering scheme. They also make a few changes to office policy,<br />
resulting a more positive work environment for all.</p>
<p>Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen on a disc housed in an Amray case, <b><i>9 to 5</i>’s<br />
special features are special indeed, anchored by a gathering of the<br />
film’s three leading ladies for a full-length audio-commentary track</b>.<br />
With producer Bruce Gilbert serving semi-successfully as wrangler, the<br />
women offer up an entertaining if laugh-filled and frequently slipshod<br />
trip down memory lane. <b>Fonda won’t name names, but says she got fired<br />
from her first (and only) office gig because she refused to sleep with<br />
the boss.</b> She also outs the actor playing Tomlin’s screen son as a pot<br />
dealer, though then everyone interjects that they mean <i>the character</i>,<br />
of course (wink, wink). Parton is chirpy to a fault, and squeals when<br />
her character once curses. Everyone is congratulatory and glad-handing,<br />
but in a way that’s less irksome since they’re so far removed from the<br />
project. It’s obvious they haven’t seen the film in some time, and<br />
Fonda at one point gets so worked up that Gilbert has to interrupt,<br />
only half-jokingly, “Jane, it’s only a movie…”<b></p>
<p>A 25-minute featurette celebrates the making of the movie</b>, and<br />
includes interviews with the aforementioned principals plus Coleman,<br />
writer Resnick and others. Their reminiscences here are thoughtful and<br />
reverent (Fonda notes the “historic synchronicity between the film and<br />
a social movement”), but if there’s a complaint it’s that this piece<br />
relies too heavily on randomly inserted film clips. A more<br />
straightforward presentation would have benefited this piece. <b>A<br />
collection of deleted scenes runs more than 11 minutes</b>, and includes<br />
excised material from Violet’s demented Snow White fantasy sequence,<br />
wherein she poisons Franklin, and another extended scene where Franklin<br />
tries to plot an escape. <b>There’s also a karaoke bit, a four-and-a-half<br />
minute tribute to Higgins (who died of AIDS in the late 1980s) and a<br />
six-minute gag reel</b> where flubbed lines abound, and Parton lets loose<br />
with this blue joke: “What’s green and smells like Miss Piggy? Kermit’s<br />
finger.”<br />
Parton’s finger-snapping, Oscar-nominated theme song may be the only thing many people recollect about <i>9 to 5</i>,<br />
but it’s a worthy revisitation in this day and age, not merely for its<br />
table-turning feminist point of view, but because it has a trio of<br />
sharply defined heroines and sharp performances, and a squirmingly<br />
effective villain who receives a just, nicely plotted comeuppance at<br />
film’s end. <b>B (Movie) B+ (Disc)</b></p>
<div class=)
That’s a great joke from Dolly Parton, but didn’t she steal that from Steve Martin?