Meet the People

Genres wax and wane over time. And then there are movies that become dated because of events. One of the bigger examples of this is the World War II morale booster. A good example of this is Meet the People.

William Swanson (Dick Powell) works at a shipbulding plant in Delaware building ships as part of the war effort. One day, a war bond drive brings to the plant the prominent musical actress Julie Hampton (Lucille Ball), with the chance to win a date with her. Wouldn't you know it, Swanson wins! And he uses the date with Julie to tell her about the play he wrote. It's one of those everyman dramas that would have been funded by the Federal Theater Project a half-dozen years earlier back when they were paying anybody to put out New Deal propaganda.

Swanson signs a contract to have the play staged in New York, with Julie starring. But there's a catch. Julie wisely doesn't like the play, and wants it turned into a rousing musical. Swanson hates this, since it would strip all the "meaning" from his play. And the contract says the play has to be performed the way he wrote it, or that he has to approve changes. And there is no way he's going to have it staged as a musical. So Swanson takes his ball and goes home, telling Julie that she really needs to "meet the people" and learn what drives them.

She actually takes that advice to heart, sort of. She decides she's going to get a job as a Rosie the Riveter type, becoming a welder even though she presumably has no idea how to do it. And she gets a job at the same plant where Swanson works! Of course, she's really trying to get back into his good graces so that she can get the musical produced.

As you can guess, there are going to be a lot of complications along the way, but that the two leads are going to wind up together in the last reel with both of them compromising somewhat. (It helps that William has a heroic Marine cousin whose songs can get used in a musical version of the play.) But half the fun is getting there.

And there is some fun, especially in a scene with Spike Jones and his band, doing a spoof of Hitler with Hitler being played by a chimpanzee! Paul Regan and his celebrity impersonations are also OK, although he never became a big star. Vaughn Monroe, a popular bandleader of the day, appears, and a young June Allyson appears, ready to fall in love with Dick Powell, marry him, and live happily ever after, or at least until he died tragically young.

But to be honest, Meet the People is a product of its time, and I have to admit that of the World War II-era musicals, I tend to prefer what Fox was putting out. MGM didn't give Meet the People the Technicolor treatment, so while it's certainly competent, it's also quite bland and the songs not particularly memorable.

Meet the People did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection. It's available on Amazon, although it's one of those movies that the TCM Shop oddly claims is on backorder.