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Marion Davies has the lead role of Tillie in this adaptation of Russ Westover's popular 1920s comic strip. Tillie is bored by both her job as a stenographer and her office romance with Mr. Whipple (George K. Arthur). She's far more interested in another man in the office, Mac (Matt Moore). Mac, however, does not seem a likely candidate for advancement, and Tillie is an ambitious girl. She thinks she has found her ticket when she meets the wealthy Pennington Fish (Harry Crocker). After one date, Tillie gets engaged to Fish. But Tillie and Mac really belong together, and after she goes back to him, he gets a promotion. Harry Crocker, who played Pennington Fish, was an especially good friend of Marion's, and he frequently worked as a personal aide to her companion, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. In the book, The Times We Had, Marion claims that she made this film and The Red Mill at the same time by doing day and nighttime shifts. Tillie the Toiler was reported as being one of the twenty-five top-grossing films of 1927, disproving the myth that Marion's films were inevitably financial flops. Her next film, The Fair Co-Ed, did even better.