In 2012, some of the confetti used in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was discovered to be shredded internal files of the Nassau County Police Department. Intact strips of paper included names, address, phone numbers and social security numbers of officers, including some who were working undercover.
While we know the importance of internal documents today, I was stunned to see this used as the main plot device of a movie from 1963. In Ladies Who Do, four cleaning women discover the value of documents recovered from trash cans in the offices they clean. They use this information to their financial advantage, in an attempt to save their neighborhood from demolition.
This is a hilarious and brilliant movie that touches on many heavy themes, but never with a heavy hand. There’s the class struggle between the working-class cleaning women vs. their upper-class superiors. There’s women vs. men. There’s rampant capitalism vs. human needs. There’s even one of my favorite staples of film: the natural leader who emerges unexpectedly.
Ladies Who Do juggles so many themes, characters and plot elements, yet watching it is as easy as breathing. And it should be taken as a warning, even today, that what you think of as disposable, whether corporate information or your lowest-paid workers, might just be your undoing if not treated properly. Just ask the Nassau County Police Department.
Dir: C.M. Pennington-Richards
Starring: Peggy Mount, Robert Morley, Harry H. Corbett
Watched on blu-ray