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One day Tess (Melanie Griffith) gets a new job and a new boss in the mergers and acquisitions department of a Wall Street firm. The boss (Sigourney Weaver) is a woman of almost exactly Tess’s age, but with a different set of accessories. For example, she talks in a low, modulated voice, and wears more businesslike clothes, and has serious hair. “If you want to get ahead in business,” Tess muses, “you’ve got to have serious hair.” Tess gets along fine with her boss until the boss goes on a skiing holiday and breaks her leg and is supposed to be in traction for six weeks. Then Tess accidentally sees a file in her boss’s computer and finds that the boss was about to steal one of Tess’s brilliant suggestions and claim it as her own.

This makes her fighting mad, and so she begins an elaborate deception in which she masquerades as an executive at the firm, and figures out a way to meet a guy named Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), who is the right guy at another firm to make the deal happen. She meets Trainer at a party and gets drunk and ends up in bed with him, even though she explained to him, “I have a head for business and a bod for sin.” Will he ever take her seriously now? Yes, it turns out, because he likes her, and because he thinks her idea really is pretty brilliant.

That’s the setup for “Working Girl,” the new Mike Nichols film, which is one of those entertainments where you laugh a lot along the way, and then you end up on the edge of your seat at the end.

Structurally, the film has some parallels with “The Graduate,” Nichols’ 1967 classic - including a climactic scene where an important ceremony is interrupted by the wrong person bursting in through the door.

But “Working Girl” is the other side of the coin. “The Graduate” was about a young man who did not want to make money in plastics.

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