The Fuller Brush Girl

The Fuller Brush Girl is a 1950 slapstick comedy starring Lucille Ball and directed by Lloyd Bacon. Animator Frank Tashlin wrote the script. Ball plays a quirky door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman for the Fuller Brush Company. The film also stars Eddie Albert and has an uncredited cameo by Red Skelton (who had starred in the Tashlin-scripted and S. Sylvan Simon directed The Fuller Brush Man two years earlier). The film reunites Lucille Ball with director Lloyd Bacon, producer S. Sylvan Simon and Frank Tashlin at Columbia Pictures after their 1949 film Miss Grant Takes Richmond.

Plot
Sally and Humphrey, who work together at the same steamship company (she as a switchboard operator, he as an office boy), wish to be able to afford monthly payments on a house they have long wanted to buy. Their boss, Harvey Simpson, unaccountably gives Humphrey a big promotion. Harvey is involved in a smuggling job which requires an oblivious patsy and it has been determined that Humphrey is it. Thrilled with this promotion, the couple are now able to go ahead and put their down-payment on the house.

Sally, however, while conferring with a friend about the friend's job with Fuller Brush, manages to accidentally destroy the switchboard and cover her boss with Fuller Brush powder; she is subsequently fired. She decides to apply for her own Fuller Brush franchise, but requires a reference from her former employer.

Borrowing her friend's kit, Sally sets out to prove she would be a good saleswoman without having to obtain the reference. A series of catastrophes ensues and, when Mr. and Mrs. Simpson are each found dead, Sally becomes the prime suspect.

Sally and Humphrey identify the real culprit and pursue her to her job dancing at a burlesque theater (where Sally has to take the stage as a means of disguise), and then onto a departing ocean liner. Humphrey becomes aware that he has been set up as a fall guy in a smuggling enterprise. Hilarity ensues as the pair are chased around the ship by a criminal gang trying to silence them, while they leap out a porthole into the ship's hold and then hide variously in rooms filled with leaky wine barrels, bunches of bananas, and a pair of talking parrots who nearly give them away. The main container of smuggled merchandise has been booby trapped with explosives to prevent a double-cross. When Sally unknowingly threatens them with it, the terrified criminals jump overboard. The explosion attracts the harbor police, who had trouble finding them in a heavy fog. Locked in an embrace, Sally and Humphrey barely notice the explosion

Cast

 * Lucille Ball as Sally Elliot
 * Eddie Albert as Humphrey Briggs
 * Carl Benton Reid as Mr. Christy
 * Gale Robbins as Ruby Rawlings
 * Jeff Donnell as Jane Bixby
 * Jerome Cowan as Harvey Simpson
 * John Litel as Mr. Watkins
 * Fred Graham as Rocky Mitchell
 * Lee Patrick as Claire Simpson
 * Arthur Space as Insp. Rodgers
 * Mel Blanc as two parrots (voice only)
 * Barbara Pepper as Woman Watching TV
 * Red Skelton as Fuller Brush Man

NOTES

Although he used different names, Arthur Space played the investigating detective in both THE FULLER BRUSH MAN and THE FULLER BRUSH GIRL.