ABSTRACT
Working Girl (directed by Mike Nichols, 1987) and Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) were immensely successful and popular films. Pretty Woman transformed Julia Roberts to a major star, doomed for ever to strive to repeat the success of the ‘shopping sequence’.1 Working Girl was seen as a return to form for director Mike Nichols,2 while Melanie Griffith’s performance was widely regarded as one of her best although there was some complaint about her ‘squeaky voice’.3 Responses to Sigourney Weaver’s Katherine in the same film were a little more muted, as most critics recognised that this character somehow bore the brunt of the film, most explicitly in the repeated reference to her ‘bony ass’ at the end.4 Both films were aimed at, and enjoyed by, a female audience. A clear signifier of this was the concern within each with dress and the performance of femininity. They were girls’ films. However, this address, as I will discuss below, was more complex than that of, for example, the ‘independent woman’ group of 1970s films I discussed in Chapter 5. There is here a different kind of bodily display, a different kind of catering to reluctant husbands and boyfriends who might be in the audience. Nevertheless, both films were clearly recognised as feminine in their concerns and newspaper reviewers were quick to point out the re-telling of Cinderella in these women’s pictures for the late twentieth century.5
