Simply Perfect

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Sexist. Men running most machines. Women inspecting finished product. Women party plan. Machine men must have made lots more $$$$$$ than lowly female inspectors. Party plan: Housewives indeed. Married to their homes. Homemaker not used much yet. Women cooked and preserved food. Men just ate, belched, passed gas and complained. Did Dad babysit while Mama was at the party? No. He didn't know how. He was out bowling with the boys, er, really out cavorting with hookers from the bowling alley. Was the head of Tupperware jealous of sharing his company leadership with a female executive of the era (an anomaly, I know)? (Not in this film, but still ... ). Probably so. Maybe he figured she should stay at home and be another unhappy little wifey. Pressure was put upon women to not just attend Tupperware parties, but to spend tons of money there. Plus, the more products a "housewife" (read 'slave') purchased, the more free gifts she could get. I have a giant green genu-wine Tupperware bowl I got several decades ago (new; not thrift shop). It's still around. I used it for a dog watering bowl. Tupperware's white bowls get old-looking, yellow/gray and dirty-looking; not at all attractive. Some cheaper store-bought storage containers work almost as well. Dollar store knockoffs aren't so bad, either. 1950s: Mother attended Stanley Home Parties. You could get a free metal ashtray by attending, or maybe it was a cheap prize for winning one of those dumb party word games.This film: Mustang car not around in 1959. Neither was Hello Dolly, as someone said. Jerry Lewis guy, indeed. Did he and Anita Bryant each get a new Mustang, or even a lifetime supply of Tupperware?

I'm a sucker for these film shorts that appear with some regularity on Turner Classics, so when I saw the title "The Wonderful World of Tupperware", I made it a point to set the alarm for 4:30 A.M so I could catch an early morning screening. I can't say this was very much entertaining per se, but it was definitely informative, down to the excruciating detail of how various bowls and other containers are painstakingly developed and reworked to produce a widely used household convenience. The narrative really brought this home when it got into elements like melt, weight and specific gravity, while I'm sitting there thinking - Come on - it's a plastic bowl for heaven's sake.But you know what, the producers of this film didn't examine this thing with a critical eye when it was completed. Back in 1959 when this was made, and the tupperware industry was basically still in it's infancy, the assembly lines and machinery depicted already looked old and rusty. Can you imagine something like this coming out today? I think it would have killed the product to see it made with those kind of conditions present.And lest the reader think that this experience was somewhat boring, the production wraps up with a hilarious depiction of a national Jubilee Sales Convention with entertainers Anita Bryant and Johnny Desmond singing the praises of Tupperware! I'm not making this up folks. If the songs weren't parodies of already existing songs ('My Momma Done Told Me' in Bryant's case), they might have gone Top 40. It finally all made sense to me when I stopped to consider that Dustin Hoffman was given some real valuable advice a few years later in "The Graduate", when the career guidance he was given was 'plastics'.

Here is an odd industrial film about Tupperware that really shows its age. Made in 1959, on the cusp of the liberalizing Sixties, everyone is exceedingly homely and square. But this film short is most intriguing for what it leaves out.Designed to keep food fresher longer, and seal flavors in, and odors out, Tupperware is "one of the brightest stars in the plastics industry -- an industry that did not exist 25 years ago," we're told in stentorian tones.We get cartoon footage of dinosaurs as we learn that plastic comes from 30 million-year-old petroleum products that started to be used industrially during WWII, with the push to produce synthetics.And we see dozens of shots of mostly female employees carefully handling the finished product and inspecting it with zeal.It took some Internet research for me to learn how Tupperware was named, and about Earl Tupper's incredibly inventive bent and eccentric, difficult personality. Interestingly, this film says nothing about how Tupper started marketing his multi-colored products as freebies to go with cigarettes.Nor do we hear a word in this film about Tupperware's patented "burping seal," which was touted as such a distinguishing factor at countless home Tupperware parties. (I remember some of these get-togethers from my childhood. At one of my mother's parties, participants played a silly game of drawing a picture while holding the paper on their heads.)We learn little in the film about the company's unusual form of home-based marketing. (According to what I read online, Tupper had a nasty break with the woman executive in his firm who championed the idea.) One of the more bizarre segments here features clips from annual Tupperware "jubilees" at which singing stars Anita Bryant and Johnny Desmond adapted Tupperware jingles to jazz standards.This little short, which I caught on TCM, left me wondering whether Tupperware exists anywhere today outside of thrift shops. A check of the Internet showed the company is alive and well and based on Orlando.

Wow. You may think this is going to be another boring industrial film--and indeed it is for the first twenty minutes--but then orange juice pitch person and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant shows up. And she belts out an absolutely AMAZING song all about Tupperware: "we're having a party...a Tupperware party..." Next, some guy who looks a bit like Jerry Lewis comes on and sings a version of Hello Dolly with new Tupperware-themed lyrics. There's also brief footage of Tupperware facilities around the globe, most of which, of course, have long since closed, including one in Wigan, Lancashire, which shut down in the late '80s. Oh sure, there's lots of blather about how, thanks to the miracle of plastics, Tupperware is keeping food fresher for longer, but who cares. We want Anita! We want Anita!