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Mad WomenRevisiting 9 to 5.

By Megan HustadPosted Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008, at 11:23 AM ET

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Canby saw the movie as a "militant cry for freedom." Yet it likely wouldn't have enjoyed nearly as much popularity had the film's message not come nestled—much like Coleman's head in one memorable scene—in the zaftig cushion of Parton's breasts. If American ticket buyers preferred their freedom fighters gussied up like Annie Oakley trolling for a date, well, so be it. And if they preferred farce to drama, that was fine, too. The dour Norma Rae, which was released the previous year, received critical acclaim but had a harder time finding an audience, doing roughly one-fifth of 9 to 5's business. Comedy, Fonda suggests on the commentary track, was the spoonful of sugar that helped the political theater go down.

Just how do you enact equity and justice in the workplace? Well, if you were to follow 9 to 5's script, you'd kick off your organizing efforts by (mistakenly) assuming you'd killed the boss in an accident involving a box of Skinny & Sweet artificial sweetener. You'd then steal his body from the hospital (to foil homicide investigators), realize that you've got the wrong body in the trunk of your car, discover the boss isn't actually dead, that he plans on reporting your (alleged) plot to kill him to the police … and, well, you can see we've strayed far from EEOC procedure here.

Judy spends the rest of the film in a nightgown baby-sitting Hart—now being held prisoner in his own home, strung up from the ceiling in a harness made of S&M gear and a garage-door opener. Meanwhile, back at the Consolidated offices, Violet and Doralee use his extended absence to implement a slate of reforms: equal pay for equal work, on-site day care, job-sharing, and flextime.

That such progress is achieved only through highly implausible shenanigans is a disappointment: It's precisely when the film turns its attention to how the office might be made more responsive to women's needs that it loses its nerve. Yet what's bound to strike anybody watching the film now is how progressive those policy recommendations sound even by today's standards. While women are no longer de facto coffee-fetchers, flextime and on-site day care remain exceptions enjoyed by a lucky few.

Given how much work remains to be done before 9 to 5's fictional reforms become the new "just normal," it's surprising how comparatively toothless many of today's workplace comedies are. Catch NBC's The Office, the movie Office Space, or read Scott Adams, and you might imagine that the worst thing that can happen to you at work is boredom. A satire about fax machines being so darn slow is hardly taking political risks. The persistent theme of The Office is that only loser employees invest in their jobs. The smart ones pretend they're not there.

It will be interesting to see whether 9 to 5's activist side will survive its transition to Broadway or whether its producers will worry that even in 2008 such anarchic energy needs to be dolled up to fill seats. But much of the material is timeless. One line from the film seems ready-made for an underhand toss to a packed Saturday-night house. "Couldn't we all just get together and complain?" Judy wails that first night at the bar. Of course not, as any 10-year-old sitting in the audience will understand. Dumb jerks in positions of power don't tend to budge in the face of mere griping.

Indeed, producer Bruce Gilbert ventures on the commentary that Franklin Hart Jr. stands in for any unscrupulous authority figure, which might be why the film was such a success, and not just with put-upon admins. Everyone could appreciate the itch to resort to strong-arm tactics, and everyone could cheer an egotistical, lying hypocrite's downfall. Gilbert's analysis of why men embraced a film that sought to upend the status quo is chewed on for a second. Parton is unconvinced: "I think they just liked the women."