Thursday Movie Picks #435: Women's Revenge Movies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is one I hadn't thought much about before, Female Revenge Movies. It's one that didn't take me too long to think up three good titles fitting the category, either, and two of them are more recent than what I usually pick:

Baby Face (1933). This obviously isn't the more recent one. Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman working in her father's Rust Belt dive bar/speakeasy, until an amateur philosopher gives her a book of Nietzsche, telling her, "Use men to get the things you want!". After the place burns to the ground, Stanwyck goes off to New York, and sets out literally to sleep her way to the top, discarding various men (watch for a young John Wayne among them) along the way. She does get to the top and company executive George Brent, whereupon she finds that life at the top can be complicated.

Nine to Five (1980). Divorcee Jane Fonda goes back into the workforce, in big-business office clerical work, finding that boss Dabney Coleman dotes on buxom secretary Dolly Parton. One day, however, Fonda and co-worker Lily Tomlin discover that Dolly really doesn't care for the attention -- and that Colmean is embezzling money from the company. They set out to expose the criminality, except that their scheme doesn't quite go to plan.

Jackie Brown (1997). Pam Grier gets to play intelligent rather than just kickass like she did in her 1970s blaxploitation films. Here, she's a flight attendant on a small airline flying between Los Angeles and Baja California, smuggling money on the side for gun runner Samuel L. Jackson. When she gets caught because someone fingered her, it leads to her getting involved with bail bonsdman Robert Forster. Together, the two of them plan a scheme to take most of the proceeds of the planned smuggling of another half a million dollars.