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In honor of Dolly Parton's recent passing, I decided to share a few thoughts about her debut feature movie.
I was a relatively-recent theatre owner when "9 to 5" came out -- we'd been owners since March of the previous year.
I remember the trailer for "9 to 5" was one of the first ones to feature a "release date" built into the trailer -- the ending narration said "9 to 5...your Christmas bonus...from 20th Century Fox." Which drove me nuts, because back then we never got anything on the break, so we didn't play the movie until April of 1981. I wound up cutting the end of the trailer off, so it ended very awkwardly, but the movie still did amazing business.
I've always thought that it was Dolly Parton and Lilly Tomlin who made that movie a hit. Jane Fonda was the biggest star in the movie, but her character wasn't really that interesting. It was Dolly and Lilly and their interactions with their boss (Dabney Coleman) that made the movie.
For any unfortunate souls who haven't seen it, the movie is about three women who work in the offices of a big company. The boss, Mr. Hart, is a sexist demeaning a-hole who will stop at nothing to further his own career, including stepping on the backs of his underlings. When untrue rumours start to spread about Hart having an affair with his secretary (Parton), the three women figure it's the last straw and, one night during a party, decide to "get even" with the boss.
Things go wrong, of course -- and to keep themselves out of jail, the three ladies devise a plan to imprison the boss in his own house while spreading the word that he's on an extended vacation. They continue to run the company in his absence and wind up doing a better job than he did. When the whole plot unravels, Mr. Hart intends to hang the ladies out to dry....but then his own boss shows up and starts heaping praise on him for doing such a wonderful job and creating all sorts of new innovations -- which were really put in place by three women. As a reward, the CEO decides to promote Hart into an even better job, but it happens to be in Brazil, so (of course) everybody's happy at the end.
The first part of the movie is more satisfying to me than the last part, because the movie starts to fall into the trap of having to resort to more and more ridiculous stuff to keep the chuckles coming. But the cast is so good that this doesn't really matter.
It's a solid 3 out of 5 for me. Even playing it four months after release, it was our Film-Tech Forums movie for 1981.
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