About Harrison Ford's (Arguably) Best Movie

This image adorned a wall of my childhood bedroom wall for quite a long time.

Since I dedicated last week's newsletter to Regarding Henry, Harrison Ford's (arguably) worst movie, I'm dedicating this week's post, the last of Harrison Ford Month, to his (arguably) best movie.

As with his worst movie, I had a hard time deciding what qualifies as his best. Obviously, there's Witness, for which he received a 1985 Best Actor Oscar nomination (his only to date). There's Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, The Fugitive, Blade Runner. Or what about The Mosquito Coast, in certain respects his most interesting film? But ultimately there was only one film for me to write about, due to both its objective quality and the regularity with which I re-watch it.

That film is Working Girl. Like Harrison's (arguably) worst movie, Regarding Henry, Working Girl was directed by Mike Nichols. Released in 1988, it's the story of Tess McGill, a plucky Staten Island secretary who dreams of making it big on Wall Street. Tess, who is played by Melanie Griffith, works for Katharine Parker, an associate partner in a mergers-and-acquisitions firm. As portrayed by Sigourney Weaver, Katharine is the embodiment of the ur-'80s career woman, all tailored power suits, supreme confidence, and dodgy ethics. While Katharine is away on a ski trip to Austria, Tess discovers she's stolen one of her ideas. In due course Tess links up with Jack Trainer, a Wall Street guy played by our very own Harrison. And we're off!

I believe Sally Jessy Raphael earned royalties for this scene.

This was the first rated-R movie I saw in a theater. I was twelve, and made my mother take me. To this day, I remember what a mindfuck it was to see Harrison Ford play a regular, present-day guy instead of a space person or a thirties-era bullwhip-wielding archeologist. In Working Girl, he gets to guzzle cocktails at a society wedding; change his shirt in front of an appreciative secretarial pool; eat a street hot dog; see Melanie Griffith's boob in the course of post-coital conversation; get groped by Sigourney Weaver; and have a sense of humor. All of this was mind-blowing to me, and added up to a palpable loss of innocence.

Now, as an adult, I appreciate Working Girl for other reasons. To begin with, there's the opening tracking shot of the Statue of Liberty, set to Carly Simon's anthemic "Let the River Run." No matter how many times I see it, it makes every hair on my head stand on end. Then there's Joan Cusack as Tess's best friend Cyn, who takes a Neapolitan ice cream approach to eyeshadow and gets the movie's best lines — Cusack's delivery of "$6,000? It's not even leather!" is forever burned in my brain. There's a perfectly snotty Nora Dunn, Oliver Platt as an office creep, and Alec Baldwin doing his sleazoid best as Tess's cheating boyfriend.

There's costuming that absolutely nails the nuanced ways clothing signifies class and belonging, and a script that offers a pitch-perfect satire of '80s-era striving. When I was a kid, the final shot of Tess sitting in her new office as the camera pulled back to reveal that it's one of many in a boring skyscraper struck me an unequivocally triumphant; now, I see it as more of a question mark: this is what all that striving amounts to? The chance to be simply another anonymous cog in the capitalist machine?

Again, Working Girl is also a movie that allows Harrison Ford to portray a regular dude. He's not saving the world or the universe or pretending to be Amish; he's just a flawed guy trying to put together a business deal with a woman he has the hots for—while hiding the relationship from his girlfriend, who is none other than Katharine Parker. Perhaps it's no coincidence that people who are not me contend that Harrison, who was 46 at the time, is at his hottest in Working Girl. And who am I to argue? He's clearly having fun with the role, and excels at the task of giving us a man who's unimpeachably sexy despite being a wee bit morally compromised.

Sometimes, you want someone who can save the universe, and sometimes, you want someone who doesn't mind being objectified by the office secretaries. The beauty of Harrison Ford is that he is equally good at inhabiting both of these roles; it's my hope that he will continue to do so for a very long time.