Love on the Dole

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.