This next movie for Movie Scenes That I Love is truly one of my all-time favorites. It has all the tenets of the type of movie I’m usually partial too: set in New York, made in the 80s and has a love story…well, some semblance of a love story – I’m not so sure that her relationship with this man is ideal. But anyway, I sort of digress — it’s “Working Girl.”
https://youtu.be/PE-3JxqiV7M (this is the only clip of the ending I could find. It’s incomplete, but it gives you some idea.)
The first I can remember seeing the movie, I was about 11 or 12-years-old at Grandmother’s house. I don’t remember seeing it from the beginning but even at that young age I was wowed by the ending. “Working Girl’s” final scene is my pick my favorite movie scene series.
If you haven’t seen this movie and you want to without finding out what’s going to happen, stop reading now. This final scene in this movie is just so brilliantly done. It’s truly the stuff movies like this are made of. It’s why I go to the movies. When I go to the movies and spend my own money, I want to be entertained. I want to come out the theatre smiling. If I saw this film at the movies, it would have done that for me. I would have stayed in my chair while everybody exited, watched the credits roll and marveled. That’s also due, in no small part, to the amazing theme song that’s played throughout the film, but really has it’s time to shine at the end.
Even as a child this last scene gave me all the feels. Back then, I had no idea what this working world was about, but I could clearly see that the main character Tess had a come up when she thought she was the secretary only to find out that she was the boss.
Now having been a New York City temp years ago, I can appreciate this movie even more. What I like about the movie in general is that while it shows the harassment that she receives from men, that main focus is the abuse and mistreatment she receives from a woman, her boss. The thing I like about Sigourney Weaver’s character – the antagonist in the movie—is that she is very cool and very calm. She doesn’t raise her voice or give Tess nasty looks, but she’s full of shit just the same. She’s rude in the condescending way she at times talks to her, rude by the tasks she gives her, and last by definitely not least, rude as hell by stealing Tess’s ideas and trying to pass them off as her own. But in the end, she loses.
Overall, the movie is about a working-class girl, trying to make it in a world that typically keeps people like her out. Yet despite the odds, she finds her way in. In the end, she’s worked so hard to get where she’s at that when she arrives, she doesn’t even realize she’s there, her assistant had to tell her. Once she realizes she’s made it, we can already see that she’s striving to be a better boss to her assistant that the bosses she’s previously had have been to her. Finally, in the end she calls her friend and lets her in on the good news about her new job. And that same theme song that plays in the beginning of the movie like a hope and a prayer, plays again at the end like an answer.
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