Zeus

Meet The People (1944)

• Director
  • Charles Reisner
• Writers
  • Sol Barzman(short story)
  • Ben Barzman(short story)
  • Louis Lantz(short story)
• Stars
  • Lucille Ball
  • Dick Powell
  • Virginia O'Brien

  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).