Love on the Dole

The film is about a working class family in the Lancashire of the thirties, a life set by unemployment and by relief payments. Sally Hardcastle, who works in a cotton mill, tries to make things a little better while the men of the house cannot find work and the means test takes away the family’s last support. A demonstration against unemployment turns into a clash with the police. Adapted from Walter Greenwood’s widely read novel, the story was kept off the screen through the whole of the thirties by the censors; the production happened only after wartime conditions had changed the country. Humour scattered through the bleakness makes the film bearable. The twenty year old Deborah Kerr appears in John Baxter’s ninety four minute British production, completed in 1941.