Tootsie · reception & legacy
1982 · Sydney Pollack
How Tootsie has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A smash in 1982 — second only to E.T. at the box office and a ten-nomination Oscar heavyweight — and it never really fell out of favour; the shift is that modern viewers now debate its gender politics as much as they quote its jokes.
What's debated
The evergreen fight: is it a genuinely feminist comedy or a movie where a man is applauded for discovering sexism — a debate further complicated by later allegations against Dustin Hoffman.
Its footprint
Home of the much-quoted line 'I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man,' and of Hoffman's tearful AFI interview about becoming Dorothy ('I was a brainwashed male'), which went viral decades after release.
Where it stands
A fixture of the American comedy canon — AFI ranked it the second-funniest US film ever, behind only Some Like It Hot, and Criterion gave it a spine number.