Meet the People

MGM's musical extravaganza Meet the People top-bills two future powerful TV executives: Dick Powell and Lucille Ball. Ball plays a popular but stuck-up Broadway star who leaves the bright lights to become a welder in a shipyard. Here she meets and falls in love with coworker Powell. This being a wartime musical, the plotline is periodically abandoned for the guest-star turns of the likes of Virginia O'Brien, Bert Lahr, Spike Jones and His City Slickers, Vaughn Monroe, and Mata and Hari. Buried beneath this cornucopia of corn is a stage play by Louis Lantz, upon which Meet the People was supposedly based. (Note: some sources mistakenly list Edward Dmytrk as the director of this film).