Meet the People (1944)

Meet the People was a 1944 MGM patriotic film made during World War II with Lucille Ball and Dick Powell that took its title from a successful Los Angeles stage revue. The film stars Lucille Ball as Julie Hampton, a stage actress who goes to work in a shipyard after the play in which she was planning to star is aborted by the shipyard worker (Dick Powell as William 'Swanee' Swanson) who wrote it, having disliked the Broadway glitz preferred by the play's director. Reporting for work the first day, actress Hampton discovers that the shipyard workers themselves are fully capable of performing in their own production. Yet in spite of a budding love interest between them, Swanson and Hampton clash over the simple authenticity of worker performers vs. the necessary essentials of a "professional" production.