This is a very cute and engaging film--buoyed by Judy Holliday's charming performance as a simple lady who wants answers! Judy is a very insignificant stockholder in a huge corporation. Like most corporations, the bulk of the stocks are controlled by thousands of tiny investors while a few larger investors are in charge of running the day to day operations. While the officers of the corporation own much less than 50% of the stock, the rest of the investors are not united. Judy sees that is a problem when she shows up at an open meeting for stockholders and finds that the board is completely unresponsive to her. She rightly reasons that as a stockholder, she has a right to be heard, but the officers treat her as a nuisance and ignore her. So, instead of just walking away and forgetting it, Judy decides to fight back by organizing the members and getting enough proxy votes to force change. At first, they laugh at the notion, but by the end of the film, it's Judy who has the last laugh! This film is very well-made and great fun to watch--with a lovely comedic tone. Too bad that Ms. Holliday died so young, as she had quite a hand for this style of film.

You'll have to wait until the very end of the film to actually see The Solid Gold Cadillac. Such a vehicle I doubt would run, I rather think this was gold sheeting. Maybe even gold paint.

Paul Douglas is the president of a big conglomerate that he built from the ground up. Now he's getting out to take a big job in Washington, in the Defense Department which is always hiring business executives. More in the Eisenhower administration than in most others for this was the presidency which had Charles E. Wilson who opined during his Senate confirmation hearings that 'what's good for General Motors is good for the USA'. Lots of folks thought that way then.

But as he's taking leave at his last stockholder's meeting 10 shares holder Judy Holliday shows up asking a lot of questions, annoying the rest of the board which has such folks as Ray Collins, John Williams, and Fred Clark on it, but she charms Douglas.

Try as I might I could not wrap my mind around the concept of a man succeeding in business as Douglas does and being such a boy scout. To avoid conflict of interest the normal procedure is to put one's holdings in a blind trust. But the fact that his company specifically does not get government contracts at Douglas's say so at the Defense Department is just off the wall. Who knows, they might actually have the low bid and the right product.

Still Douglas does what he does and would be actress Holliday is actually hired by the company. But our villains are indeed full of tricks.

George S. Kaufman is one of the creators and I find that hard to believe. I think Kaufman was having an off day. Holliday and Douglas do the best they can with limited material as does the rest of the cast.

That's what Laura Partridge (Judy Holliday) will find out when she interrupts the annual stockholder's meeting and creates a menace to the bores who get astronomical salaries for doing practically nothing. Before she can object to the passing on the minutes of the previous meetings, she is given a do-nothing executive position to pacify small stockholders like herself, and stirs the whole company's pot into a frenzy. The very funny Broadway play (which starred the very different Josephine Hull) focused on a sweet little old lady, but was intelligently altered as a vehicle for Holliday.

Paul Douglas, Holliday's co-star from the original stage version of "Born Yesterday', is wonderfully witty (and sweet!) as the founder of the company who becomes Holliday's ally in Washington where he now works in a government job. There's no stopping this team against the ruthless idiocy of the likes of Ray Collins, Fred Clark (in a hysterically funny snarky performance!) and John Williams, showing that big business cannot survive without the little people.