Stenos, Anyone?

By RICHARD CORLISS

NINE TO FIVE

Directed by Colin Higgins Screenplay by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick

7 a.m. The metronomic beat begins. The alarm clocks--one square, one frilly, one sensibly round--start ringing. Kiss the kids goodbye. Stop for a red light. 7:55. A city full of female legs: walking, running, bicycling, escalatoring. Hands hail a cab, finger a watch, exchange coins for coffee. The coffee spills on her new pumps. 8:50. Speed-read the morning paper, run for the elevator, just miss it. One pert, frazzled woman checks a scrawled address, enters the anonymous skyscraper, ascends to her new job. The elevator doors open, then begin to close. She realizes that this is her floor and dashes through the doors.

All praise to Wayne Fitzgerald and David Oliver, who devised this witty, vivacious credit sequence, and to Dolly Parton for composing and singing the title song. Alas, it consumes only 2 1/2 minutes of Colin Higgins' slapstick sermon on job equality. The rest of the film is misjudged and malign. Higgins has little more to tell us about the personalities of his three secretaries than those first alarm clocks did: Judy (Jane Fonda) is square, Doralee (Dolly Parton) is frilly, Vi (Lily Tomlin) is sensible. Together, though, they are a Stenographic catastrophe; they'd lose the quick-brown-fox race to Charlie's Angels. Vi, "the smart one," thinks she has poisoned her insufferable boss; she hasn't. The three then kidnap a cadaver from the hospital, thinking they've got their boss in the car trunk; they haven't. The movie is just as absentmindedly schizophrenic. Nine to Five thinks it's a suspenseful comedy with a mind of its own; it isn't and hasn't.

And so it careers from cutesie-poo dream sequences to bondage-and-discipline revenge, from a giggly hen party to an answer to the working woman's prayer: a "liberated" work space, complete with racial harmony, reformed alcoholics, a day-care center and athletic amputees vaulting merrily from wheelchair to desk chair. Through the ordeal, Lily and Dolly prove themselves game professionals. Tomlin is a crackerjack comic actress, even when the confection is stale, and Parton has as fetching a way with a line of dialogue as she has with the curve of an angora sweater. Only Fonda succumbs: she plays her character like a cross between Barbarella and Barbie doll. But that is Higgins' way. He wants both to leer and to lecture. Nine to Five is a vile mess, but it may find its audience --the one desperate for movie comedy, the one that has made Airplane! and Private Benjamin two of the year's top-grossing films. Some people will go anywhere for a laugh, and Higgins will go to any lengths to get them.

--By Richard Corliss

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