Plot

In the prologue, the audience is introduced to Maisie, a typical office girl. Her job begins at 8:30 AM, but she has set her alarm clock for 8:25 AM. So she has a hectic time of dressing up and running to her workplace. She spends her workday reading novels (all of them a variation of "Gone with the Wind") and eating sweets. After the end of her workday, she heads to a hat shop and gets to choose among various weird hats. She finds one to her liking and orders a copy for herself. Then the audience is introduced to the hat designers: mental patients in padded cells. One of them is briefly released and gets to create Maisie's hat. Maisie happily wears her weird new hat, unaware that she is scaring a cat. The film ends with a tribute to the men who sacrificed their life and their sanity for the hat industry.—Dimos

Maisie is a secretary. We watch her dashing to work, then sitting through a typical day, reading novels and eating candy. But that's all prelude, as she lives to shop, particularly for hats. She tries on a wide variety of hats, but her heart is set on #36, which she's told must be special ordered. She orders it, and we switch to the hat workshop, where we see the designers, all of them clearly insane. Number 36 is let out long enough to whip one up for Maisie.—Jon Reeves <jreeves@imdb.com>