THE WORKING GIRLS
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1974
United States. 81 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 5 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10.)

Honey arrives in Los Angeles in search of a new life, and soon moves in with Denise and Jill. Honey is broke, but resourceful, eventually convincing an eccentric millionaire to hire her as his companion and confidant. Meanwhile, Denise falls in love with a shady musician while nightclub waitress, Jill, winds up in over her head when pressured by her boss to take on other responsibilities. All three women become endangered by the activities of the men in their lives, before realizing that they have to take matters into their own hands.

Rothman’s final film, and the only one for which she is the sole credited writer (or as she puts it, “means I take all the blame for it.”), may just be her masterpiece. By the end of her tenure in the film industry, the political subtext that had colored her earlier works had become the outright text, with sex work, equity in the workplace, and abuse becoming the focal points to each of her characters’ conflicts. What the film may lack in production values compared to her New World productions, it more than makes up for in the sophistication of Rothman’s compositions. While still undoubtedly a sex comedy, Rothman finds subtle ways of visually expressing the film’s themes. Case-in-point: With Jill being a nightclub waitress-cum-manager, of course the film includes gratuitous sequences of women stripping on stage (including a pre-“Elvira” Cassandra Peterson), but before Rothman makes a point of including POV inserts of the hideous men in the club’s audience, their presence lingering over what, in another director’s hands, would have been a lustful rather than dangerously leery affair.