Thursday Movie Picks, August 10, 2023: Workplace, the Female Experience

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is the female experience in the workplace. Even though I'm generally a fan of older movies, you'd be surprised how many older movies could fit thi theme, in no small part because of all those intrepid lady reporters portrayed on the screen. OK, those movies probably weren't that realistic, and in the end I decided to go with a different set of movie, with one pre-Code and two more recent movies:

Female (1933). Ruth Chatterton plays the owner of the family automobile company, who just can't find the right man because everybody's intimidated by her. And then she goes slumming and runs into George Brent, only find out afterwards that Brent is really the automotive engineer that she's been trying to woo (professionally, not romantically) away from a rival company. Women are probably going to hate the ending to this movie.

Swing Shift (1984). Goldie Hawn plays a housewife living in Los Angeles with her husband (Ed Harris) in late 1941. Sure enough December 7 comes along, and hubby goes off to fight the war. Goldie and her best friend (Christine Lahti) go off to work in one of the aircraft plants. Goldie meets Kurt Russell, who's working in the factory because he's 4F and can't fight, and the two start a romnce, which is of course an issue since Goldie is already married.

Working Girl (1988). Melanie Griffith stars as a secretary at a stock brokerage trying to better herself by getting a business degree, eventually winding up as executive assistant to Sigourney Weaver. There, she finds that her boss is stealing her ideas and passing them off as her own. So she tries to turn the tables, but things get complicated when she falls in love with the guy (Harrison Ford) who's part of her scheme.