Du Barry Was a Lady was Lucille Ball’s first major musical at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in which she played a nightclub singer who dreamed of being a French countess.
Du Barry Was a Lady was released in 1943, directed by Roy Del Ruth and based on a Broadway musical by Cole Porter. Lucille Ball played May Daly, a nightclub singer, and Red Skelton played Alec Howe, a cloakroom attendant who was in love with her. After drinking a drugged cocktail, Alec dreamed that May was Madame Du Barry, the mistress of King Louis XV of France, and that he was King Louis himself.
The dream sequence allowed Ball to play a glamorous historical figure, in elaborate costumes and musical numbers, while the present-day story kept her comic timing at the centre. The film’s songs included Friendship, performed by Ball and Skelton.
Du Barry Was a Lady was a success, and it helped to establish Ball at MGM, where she had signed in 1942. It showed that she could lead a musical, and it remains one of her most colourful films of the 1940s.