Love on the Dole

Love On The Dole was Deborah Kerr's third film and the second one where it was British social inequality. I have to say this film completely took me by surprise. Given the title I was expecting some frothy comedy about young people in love trying to make ends meet on public assistance with a happy ending. This film was anything but what I described.

Kerr starred in this coming off Major Barbara which took a less intense view of some of the same issues. Love On The Dole wasn't exactly peppered with Shavian type wit. It makes its points in a far more serious vein.

Not only did the title throw me for a loop, it is one of the most depressing pictures you'll ever see. It's about the United Kingdom during the Depression, set during the early Thirties. The Hardcastle family with father George Carney, mother Mary Merrall and grown children Deborah Kerr and Geoffrey Hibbert are just getting by. Father gets laid off and they go on the dole.

Not after a taste of the good life when Hibbert wins on a longshot bet with bookmaker Frank Cellier and he takes his girlfriend Joyce Howard to the resort in Blackpool and Kerr and her young man Clifford Evans comes along as well. Evans has all kinds of ideas that would find a home in the very left part of the Labour Party and he'd like to marry Kerr, but finances are against it.

In the end Kerr makes a critical decision to take her out of her slum neighborhood and the drab life she can look forward to. Believe me this is a decision you would never see in any American film of that era.

Love On The Dole is as drab as the area and people it portrays. But by no means is it bad. In fact it's one of the most realistic of films you'll ever see.

A British drama; A story set in Salford, England, during the depression. A proud miner struggles to provide for his family, while his daughter fends off the advances of two men: a kindly Labour Party representative and an oily bookmaker. Tightly scripted and deeply affecting, it deals with the theme of a classic 1930s dilemma: escape poverty or keep faith with the morality of her class and Lancashire values. The film resonates with a strong feeling for the genuine harshness and brutal truths of poverty and unemployment. There are all-round good performances, especially by Deborah Kerr, who is subtly affecting in her portrayal of personal conflict, and Geoffrey Hibbert, who plays his part with innocence and remarkable poignance. While the film has a gloomy feel, it also has comic relief as well as pathos, and there is a heartfelt feeling throughout the different subplots that avoids mawkishness and over-sentimentality. As an aside, this was an adaptation of the Walter Greenwood novel, scripted by himself, and was censored up until its release for its "sordid" story and comment on social conditions. The film reinforced the view at the time that Britain and its working classes had survived such hardships and would survive others. The outbreak of war was one of the main catalysts for change in housing conditions in communities like Hanky Park due to full employment and a Labour Party landslide victory in 1946.

Love On the Dole gives you an idea on what life was like in the North West in 1930, during the Depression. This is quite a good movie.

It focuses on a family of four where the dad works in a coal mine. The daughter works in a mill and falls in love with a factory worker, but is killed after getting involved in a fight during a demonstration. She then meets someone else and she gets him to give jobs to her dad and brother, who have both been made redundant.

This movie reminds me of early episodes of Coronation Street that I've seen, even though it was made long before that soap was first broadcast (and both long before I was born!).

The cast includes Deborah Kerr and Clifford Evans.

If you like old British movies, this is recommended.

Rating: 3 and a half stars out of 5.

Twenty-year-old Deborah Kerr has the biggest role in this movie about a poor family and the people around them. It was her second movie appearance -- another had wound up on the cutting-room floor -- and she is affecting amidst the turbulent tale of a girl working in the cotton mills while her father, George Carney, and brother, Geoffrey Hibbert, can barely keep their heads above water on their meager wages. Then times get worse, and the men wind up on the dole....

It's the beginning of the Kitchen Sink dramas of the 1950s, arising out of the Manchester School, so there's a trip to Blackpool, and a pending marriage with socialist Clifford Evans, and gossiping neighbors, and even police striking down marchers protesting the dole getting cut. Director John Baxter spent most of his career directing unpretentious entertainment, and while he manages the personal tragedies well, there's no real sense of anything larger, just the grind, grind, grind of poverty in the depths of the Great Depression; but perhaps there's nothing more required to make the larger point.

This is a typical BBC2 or Channel 4 afternoon offering: British, black and white, at least 40 years old and just what you'd watch if you are indeed on the dole.

It reminds me of This Happy Breed (1944), featuring working class people and their daily struggle for survival in a class-ridden society, only this time it's the Great Depression in the Welsh valleys. They face temptations, peer hostility if they do not conform to the norm, and total frustration (though in this case alleviated by a seaside visit to Blackpool, that epitome of Englishness).

It is actually a very political film, containing a violent clash between the unemployed demonstrators and the stubborn, violent police. Presumably the prime minister of the day - Winston Churchill - would have loved this film as he battered the workers himself a few times.

John Baxter, the director, was never a household name, probably because of his strange, expressionist editing which is unusual for any British film, let alone this offering from the war years. However, there are some advanced - for 1941 - special effects.

The film could have benefited from some outside, location shooting down in south Wales, too. Somewhere like Ferndale, perhaps.