Colin Higgins (1980)

Three female office workers – Judy Bernly (Fonda), Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) and Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) – take revenge on their intolerable male boss Franklin M Hart Jr (Dabney Coleman), a ‘sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot’, by kidnapping him.  Whether or not the #MeToo movement is in part responsible for the recent re-release of Nine to Five, it’s no surprise that, nearly forty years after it first appeared, the film is being praised for its undiminished topicality.  More striking is the discovery of how seriously this workplace comedy (which I’d never seen before) took itself back in 1980.  The programme note for the BFI screening included an extract from Christopher Andersen’s 1990 biography of Jane Fonda (Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda).  In developing Nine to Five, Fonda interviewed ‘office workers around the country’,  She and the film’s producer Bruce Gilbert also hired Patricia Resnick ‘to work undercover as a clerical worker at an employment agency and a major insurance firm, gathering material for the final screenplay’, which Resnick co-wrote with the director Colin Higgins.  The script is full of bad jokes.  It’s an even worse joke that such serious-minded research resulted in this dim and shallow movie.

Nine to Five’s established reputation as a feminist comedy blinds people to how insulting to womankind it often is.  The opening credits appear against a montage of women on their way to work – dropping their papers, spilling their coffee, generally showing how ditsy they are.  These commuters aren’t seen again; the sequence ends with the appearance of Fonda’s Judy, arriving for her first day at Consolidated Companies.  She’s been forced to return to work in light of her recent divorce but Judy’s outfit suggests she’s on her way to a wedding.  According to the Citizen Jane piece, this was Fonda’s idea:  ‘I asked our costume designer, Ann Roth, to overdress me’.  Roth certainly obliged.  The hat and ‘uptight suit’, along with the ‘fifties hairdo, oversized glasses and a “prim but frilly blouse”’ chosen by Fonda, echo her crudely conceived wardrobe in Coming Home (1978), in the scenes before the conventional housewife she plays is politically radicalised.  Jane Fonda’s comic talents (proved in Barefoot in the Park, for example) are invisible in Nine to Five.  It doesn’t help that her role is poorly written but Fonda keeps slipping in and out of character:  the only consistent element is her condescension towards Judy.  It’s a rare bad performance from her.

It says a lot about Nine to Five that a sequence in which the inept Judy is humiliated by an out-of-control photocopier is as funny as anything in the film.  It’s a mixture of the basic visual comedy and contempt for the level at which Colin Higgins is operating that makes you laugh.  Franklin Hart’s many wrongdoings include spreading rumours (why would he?) that he’s having an affair with his secretary Doralee, whom he sexually harasses but who is loyal to her husband (Jeffrey Douglas Thomas).  The bitchy assumption within Hart’s office that Doralee is his mistress – a canard that snooty Judy is happy to believe at first – hardly reflects well on the other female staff.  The main trio’s co-workers include old lush Peggy (Margaret Foster) and the desperate-spinster office sneak Roz (Elizabeth Wilson).   Perhaps the film-makers would explain these caricatures as products of patriarchy but they’d be harder put to justify Doralee’s warning to Hart, when she realises the lies he’s been telling about their relationship.  She keeps a gun in her bag and, in one of the film’s best-known lines, tells the boss that if he doesn’t change his ways, ‘I’m gonna turn you from a rooster to a hen with one shot’.  This equation of female and castrated male sums up well the depth of Nine to Five‘s feminism.

Once they’ve joined forces, but before the kidnap, Doralee, Violet and Judy drink and smoke a joint together and each tells the others how she’d take her revenge on Hart.  The three fantasy sequences that follow are no great shakes but lively enough to expose the weakness of what actually happens subsequently.  Violet’s accidental poisoning of Hart and the women’s theft from a hospital of a corpse they think is him, when he’s already discharged himself, are a taste of things to come.  The holding Hart hostage part of the story is protracted and uninventive but that’s nothing compared with the denouement.

Office supervisor Violet, a widowed mother of four, is evidently good at her job; Lily Tomlin is likeable and comically resourceful in the role.  (A scene of Violet at home with her son (David Price), in which she fixes a garage door and briefly celebrates, is a rare pleasing interlude – and just about all we see of her domestic world.)  The combination makes Violet exceptional in the film and you root for her – a main reason why the ending is such a letdown.  Hart has made a habit of claiming as his own Violet’s ideas for working practices that make the office more efficient.  During his enforced absence, she and the others introduce equal pay for male and female employees, job shares, flexible working hours and a day nursery.  The changes result in increased productivity.  When he eventually escapes and returns to the office, Hart, true to form, takes credit for these innovations, which the company chairman (Sterling Hayden) commends – except for the equal pay.  To Hart’s horror, his reward is a posting to Brazil to develop Consolidated Companies operations there – but we’re denied the pleasure of seeing Violet properly recognised.  All we get is an on-screen legend at the end which tells us Violet was made a company vice-president ‘for keeping calm in a crisis’.  How did that happen, given the chairman’s obvious sexual discrimination?

The legends summarising what Doralee and Judy did next, on the other hand, are all too convincing indications of the film’s ethos.  Doralee became a C&W singer:  quite right, because she’s always just been Dolly Parton pretending.  (Parton can act though within severe limits.  She also wrote, and sings, the film’s title song.  It’s zippy but the lyrics describe the lot of a put upon worker regardless of gender.)  Judy doesn’t learn much from her realisation during the story that her first husband (Lawrence Pressman), who left her for a younger woman, is a sexual hypocrite as well as an adulterer.  The closing text on screen tells us she fell in love with a Xerox representative, remarried and gave up work.

The boss is a cardboard villain and a figure of fun much too soon:  his desk chair collapses in his very first scene (and keeps on doing so).  The conception might have more substance if Hart had plausible charm enough to deceive but Dabney Coleman makes him thoroughly unattractive.  And Hart is comprehensively contemptible:  an exploitative lech, who’s also useless at his job, an embezzler and not even much of a breadwinner (his infinitely trusting wife (Marian Mercer) is super-rich).  There’s a hint early on, in a conversation between him and a male colleague, that Hart is typical of a pernicious office culture but it’s the only hint.  As often happens in movies purporting to expose social or moral evils, the script locates them in a single character.

Nine to Five was a huge box-office success on its original release and you can understand why.  It was a daft broad comedy that gave easy pleasure to many.  Its subject was reasonably distinctive in an era when job-sharing and workplace childcare, for example, were much less common than they’ve since become.  But that’s no reason to treat the film with respect thirty-eight years later.  Those closing legends also inform us that Franklin M Hart was abducted by Amazons in the Brazilian jungle and never heard of again:  problem solved, then.  Yet Nine to Five is still as ‘relevant today as it was when it was first released’ (BFI website).  Something doesn’t add up here.

21 November 2018