Love on the Dole **** (1941, Deborah Kerr, Clifford Evans, George Carney, Joyce Howard, Frank Cellier, Geoffrey Hibbert, Frank Pettingell, Mary Merrall) – Classic Movie Review 7010

Producer-director John Baxter’s 1941 concerned social drama is a showcase for the young Deborah Kerr, who became a movie star as Sally Hardcastle the mill girl, in this early British realist film of the Walter Greenwood novel (and the play version by Ronald Gow) about a working-class Lancashire family in the Depression.

Sally rejects her lover, socialist factory hand Larry Meath (Clifford Evans), who will not marry her when he is put on the dole, and instead goes to live with a lecherous rich bookie (Frank Pettingell) to help her brother Harry (Geoffrey Hibbert) and his pregnant girl Helen (Joyce Howard).

In an outstanding performance, Kerr is exceptionally good, both brisk and vulnerable, all the characters are fully etched, vivid people, and the film is important as a social document and as an unusual Forties attempt to look at life in the raw.

To play devil’s advocate, counting against Love on the Dole is the sentimental melodramatic plot, the cheese-paring production and its faded air. But the characters, performances and the film’s caring, popular, humanist stance combine easily to triumph over these downsides.

It is also important as a trailblazer and signpost to the British realist dramas of the late Fifties and early Sixties.

Also in the cast are George Carney, Frank Cellier, Mary Merrall, Kenneth Griffith, Iris Vandeleur, Marie Ault, A Bromley Davenport, Marjorie Rhodes, Maire O’Neill, Joyce Howard, Charles Groves, Terry Conlin, James Harcourt, Ben Williams, Dennis Wyndham, Jordan Lawrence, Colin Chandler, Charles Williams, Muriel George, John Slater, Peter Gawthorne and Martin Walker.

Love on the Dole is directed by John Baxter, runs 99 minutes, is a British National Films production, is released by Anglo-American, is written by Walter Greenwood, Barbara Emory and Rollo Gamble, based on the Walter Greenwood novel and the play version by Ronald Gow, is shot in black and white by James Wilson, is produced by John Baxter and is scored by Richard Addinsell.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7010

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