Yes, Melanie Griffith makes a good temp

Hot on the heels of Wall Street was Working Girl, the romantic version of Oliver Stone's 1986 film preaching the gospel of greed. This is a world dominated by talk of mergers and acquisitions, arbitrage and million-dollar negotiations. It's a world where your career hinges on every decision and you snort cocaine with rolled-up hundred-dollar bills. Rolled-up twenties if you're nearing the end of Chapter 10. Where am I going with all this capitalist rhetoric? I don't know; I just like the idea of snorting coke with rolled-up money.

The Working Girl of the movie's title is Melanie Griffith, a secretary who bounces from temp job to temp job, never getting ahead because no one takes her seriously. She has good ideas and a good amount of intelligence but talks like Marilyn Monroe and has Axl Rose's hair. And she never could act, but that's just my opinion. We follow her to her new job as assistant to Sigourney Weaver, the movie's resident queen b*tch who we learn is actually younger than Griffith's character. Poor Mel.

Things suck for Melanie with this new job, not to mention the fact that she interrupts the coitus of her boyfriend (Alec Baldwin) and another woman. And, I'm sorry, if my best friend was a two-tone eyeshadowed Joan Cusack, I'd be a little depressed too. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel: Weaver goes skiing one weekend and breaks her leg and, while she's laid up in the hospital, Griffith gets to pretty much take over her business transactions.

She also gets to partake in that favorite activity of '80s corporate comedies: pretend she's someone else to get ahead. Once Griffith discovers Weaver was about to steal one of her ideas and pass it off as her own, Mel decides to one-up her and propose the deal herself, working out of Sigourney the Gatekeeper's office. And she meets a man of her own, hotshot Harrison Ford, doing the charming businessman turn he would later botch in the 1995 remake of Sabrina.

It turns into a big corporate love triangle. Once you hear Weaver mention she's seeing a man who may want to merge with her and later hear Ford speak of a domineering woman he's trying to break it off with, you put two and two together and realize sparks are going to fly in the last reel. That's when the wheeler-dealer gloves come off and Weaver shows her true colors, ending a fun ride that ranks right up there with the best semi-serious romantic comedies of the Reagan era.