The story of the 1950s Tupperware empire is told with wit and authority in this locally made documentary from Laurie Kahn-Leavitt. Earl S. Tupper, a Massachusetts inventor, came up with the polyethylene product " bowls that burped, " but it was a bundle of sorority-gal energy, Brownie Wise, who persuaded Tupper to pull his product from stores and sell it only through in-your-home parties. While the antisocial Tupper stayed in his New England office, the dashing Wise took charge of the day-to-day business at a newly built Disneyland-like Florida headquarters. It was she — Mamie Eisenhower meets Betty Furness — who built a national corps of eager salespeople, mostly lower-middle-class women with high-school educations who used their Tupperware money as second incomes.

Most of Tupperware! is a valentine to the company, and especially to Wise, the first woman to grace the cover of Business Week. Only in the last act is there a capitalist breakdown, when it becomes clear that there was a glass ceiling in Tupperware for every woman other than Wise. And then there’s the inevitable fight between Wise and her jealous boss, with the loser purged, becoming a forgotten 1950s icon, like S&H Green Stamps and Studebakers. (62 minutes)