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"It looked just like Skinny N' Sweet. Well, except for that little skull and crossbones on the label..."

With Mother's Day just around the corner, my mind turns to the classic, Helen Reddy-inspired films of my childhood - better known as "chick flicks." While people like Scorsese write lusciously about discovering such ladies as Guilietta Masina in flicks like Fellini's NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, my dusty memories are not so highbrow. In the wilds of Indiana and North Carolina where I grew up (where Scorsese's romantic/yellowing "art cinemas" are an unheard of wonder), the only thing a young, budding cineaste such as myself could turn to was...HBO.(Though remember, this is HBO before it existed in triplicate, i.e., the HBO 1, HBO 2, HBO 3 of today and before it got all hoity-toity with its "acclaimed" original fare like the If These Walls Could Talks, the Soprani, etc.) This is the HBO that replayed the same ten crappy movies ad nauseum: The Cannonball Run, Red Dawn, the Smokey & The Bandit trilogy and if you got really lucky, The Incredibly Shrinking Woman. What's my point? Well, with that last selection, we're getting warmer...

From the glory of Marlene Dietrich running a nightclub in Blonde Venus to Katherine Hepburn hitting the office in pants in Desk Set, the working woman has always made for a great yarn-on-film. But in the 80s, she really threw it into high-gear (heck, the genre even made enough room for Melanie Griffith in Working Girl). No movie found a more entertaining approach to the subject than the 1980 classic 9 To 5. Jane Fonda plays Judy Bernly, a recently divorced lady who hits the NYC pavement determined to "get her work on" and make do in the office pool of a large, anonymous company. After much bumbling around, she eventually befriends the wisecracking, looked-over office Manager Violet (Lilly Tomlin) and the busty, country-voiced stenographer, Doralee (Dolly Parton). All three women fall victim to the icky advances of their boss Franklin Hart, Jr. (played by 80s stalwart Dabney Coleman), but quickly reach their limits. Mad cap hilarity ensues once the ladies tie up the boss, and set about remaking the company...their way.

Jane is this film's nuclear epicenter. On celluloid, Jane's morphed from the dewy-eyed, go-go boot, daddy-taunting vixen of 60s cult-trash (i.e. the star of Roger Vadim's films - and bed!) to a risk-taking artist/political muckracker the likes of which Hollywood never sees anymore. Does Gwyneth Paltrow shake her bony, emaciated fist at the bloodshed in Chechnya? Does Cameron Diaz put down her M.A.C. compact long enough to poo-poo the raiding of Elian's little bungalow? I think not. But not our Jane. After straddling that tank and wagging her finger at the Vietnam war, she went on to make some great films: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The China Syndrome, and, best of all, Klute. Often in these films, "muckracking Jane" is a little too earnest and wears her political ambition on the cuff of her Liz Claiborne-sleeves. That's what makes 9 To 5 so special, so canonical in her oeuvre. Her 1980's Judy Bernly is everything the 1970's Jane Fonda has never, ever been: naive, clumsy and dare I say, common. Her comedic skills - rarely ever displayed onscreen - are workin' here full tilt boogie. (Most notable is her sidesplitting ballet with the freaked-out office copier, vaguely reminiscent in scale of the supercomputer W.O.P.P.E.R. in WarGames.)

The remaining two divas of the film deliver equal, career-high work. Tomlin, also cast deliciously against-type as the working mother, is heartwarming and tough-talking (when it comes to no-nonsense, lay-down-the-law characters, she always delivers). Often stuck in vehicles that never got out of neutral (take one whiff of the flatulent Rhinestone or Straight Talk for instance), Parton is buxom, busty divinity as the wannabe-country-singer with a heart of gold. In short, 9 To 5 is a not-to-miss!

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