Working Girls x3!

A Triple Feature of “Working Girls” Films Directed by Women

1:00 pm WORKING GIRLS (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)

2:30 pm THE WORKING GIRLS (Stephanie Rothman, 1974)

4:00 pm WORKING GIRLS (Lizzie Borden, 1986)

*$8 per ticket or all-access pass for the triple feature for $20.

1:00pm — Working Girls in 35mm (1931, 77m) dir Dorothy Arzner w/ Judith Wood, Dorothy Hall, Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Paul Lukas, and Frances Dee. Sisters Mae and June Thorpe arrive in New York where they room in a women’s boarding house and quickly learn how to survive the dating, labor, and consumerist markets of the big city in this sharp-tongued, emotionally nuanced, and furiously ironic pre-Code satire written by Zoë Akins. 

Lesbian filmmaker Dorothy Arzner was one of the only women to have a continuous career as a director in the classical Hollywood studio system, where she made twenty films between 1927 and 1943. 

35mm print provided by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

2:30 pm — The Working Girls (1974, 81m) dir Stephanie Rothman w/ Sarah Kennedy, Laurie Rose, Lynne Guthrie, and Mary Beth Hughes. Three young single working women room together in 1970s Los Angeles while assuming a variety of odd jobs in this Second Wave exploitation comedy. Farmgirl-turned-Marxist-stock-strategist Honey (Kennedy) moonlights as a paid companion to an exploitative millionaire, Denise (Rose) is a nude artist and billboard painter who gets involved with a huckster street musician, and law student Jill (Guthrie) works as a cocktail waitress but her ambition is to become a Supreme Court Justice. 

Stephanie Rothman cut her teeth working on low-budget exploitation films for Roger Corman. She wrote, directed, and produced seven features between 1966 and 1974, including Terminal Island, The Velvet Vampire, The Student Nurses, and Group Marriage. In her own words, “Today film scholars call this Second Wave Exploitation, but when I made it it was known as a low-budget exploitation film that had to be more transgressive than major studio films to compete. Even then, to my surprise and pleasure, there were a few scholars and reviewers who saw beyond those trappings to its core message…learning how to be a capitalist can lead to becoming a utopian socialist.”

New 4k restoration by the Museum of Modern Art from the only known surviving 35mm print in the director’s personal collection. DCP provided by MoMA, courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

4:00 pm — Working Girls (1986, 93m) dir Lizzie Borden w/ Louise Smith, Deborah Banks, Liz Caldwell, and Ellen McElduff. A day in the life of female sex workers at a popular Manhattan brothel reveals the creative labor and erotic power of women trying to make ends meet. Molly is a photographer and college graduate whose girlfriend doesn’t know about her part-time job. Gina pursues her dream of one day owning a boutique shop by giving lonely men prostate massages. Lucy is a domineering madam who reminds us that the libidinal economy of misogyny is not the sole property of men. Director, producer, and co-writer Lizzie Borden was inspired by the experiences of sex workers she met while filming her intersectional socialist masterpiece, Born in Flames (1983). Co-written by Sandra Kay and with cinematography by Judy Irola, Working Girls is a hilarious, devastating, and relentlessly timely snapshot of the ordinary gendered labor sustaining the world’s oldest profession. 

New 4k restoration! DCP provided by Criterion / Janus. 

*This event is brought to you by Archives on Screen, Twin Cities with generous support from the UMN Imagine Fund.

$20 tickets (12:55PM) are for the triple feature. $8 tickets are for individual screenings.