BEFORE: Happy Labor Day! (Do people wish each other "Happy Labor Day"?) I celebrated with a backyard vegetarian-friendly (mostly) barbecue for some ex-co-workers, most of whom I haven't seen in months. And by watching this film, celebrating a young man's climb up the corporate ladder, in musical form.
THE PLOT: Armed with a "How to..." manual, an ambitious window washer seeks to climb the corporate ladder.
AFTER: I should point out that I saw this musical done on stage, by a community theater group, about three decades ago, but I've never watched the film version. Yes, I have a background in musical theater, I was probably in 8 or 10 community plays during my high-school years, my stock in trade was playing whatever authority figure a play had to offer - the boss in "The Pajama Game", the mayor in "Bye Bye Birdie", and Chief Sitting Bull in "Annie Get Your Gun". That last one was particularly difficult, since I had to do the whole play without my glasses, so I was essentially performing blind... Oh, and I played Senator Bullmoose in "Li'l Abner", too - see the pattern? If I had been in a production of this play, I'd probably have been cast as J.P. Biggley, or perhaps the Chairman of the Board - whichever role could be sung as a low baritone.
A lot of connections here to last night's film, though one shows the office politics of the 1960's and the other is set in 1980...but both films deal in archetypes - here we have the nincompoop boss (again), the boss's conniving nephew, the boss's sexpot secretary/mistress, and the young starry-eyed window-washer, who dreams of being a junior executive with a corner office. That man is J. Pierpont Finch, played by Robert Morse, who originated the role on Broadway. I always perceived him as sort of a poor man's Jerry Lewis (I don't take the time to watch the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, so this is sort of the next best thing).
Also, like in last night's film, we never really find out what exactly the company does. Sure, they talk about making wickets (funny, I remembered it as being widgets) but no one ever seems to know what they are. In "9 To 5" this seemed like a glaring omission, but here it seems more like it's used for comic effect - no one NEEDS to know what a wicket is, in order to skate by at semi-performing their job.
Finch has a little bit of help in the corporate world, from a how-to manual called (you guessed it...) "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying". And the tips in the book really seem to work - within minutes of applying for a job, he's finagled a position for himself, and he parlays that mailroom job into a junior executive opportunity in just a matter of days - or is it hours? After that, he uses little tricks to get ahead, and everything's on track - until he works for an executive who's read the exact same manual...
The corporate tricks are clever, if quite unrealistic, and I found the songs by Frank Loesser catchy, but somehow they weren't as memorable as, say, songs from "Fiddler on the Roof" or "The Sound of Music", which will stay with me forever. I'm not sure why that is, other than the fact that I had to perform those latter songs on stage...
Obviously, a movie reflects the attitudes of the time during which it was created - and it seems like the implication here is that women only worked as secretaries so they could land themselves rich men, then quit, get married and raise babies (while their husbands fool around with other secretaries...) and a female executive here would be absolutely out of the question. Still, there are some timeless elements here, and I can't help but feel that this movie aged slightly better than "9 To 5" did. I don't watch current TV hit "Mad Men", but I think it probably picks up on some of these romanticized 1960's elements. I feel that the 1980's nostalgia should be in full-swing by now, and I'm wondering why we're still discussing the 1960's.
Also starring Michele Lee and old-time bandleader Rudy Vallee.
RATING: 6 out of 10 dictation pads
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