Propaganda for democracy: The curious case of Love on the Dole

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 846-874

  Levine, Caroline ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149257553     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/505960     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. Greenwood's novel was an immediate success when it first appeared in England in 1933. Reissued ten times in just three years, it was also translated into a number of languages, including Hebrew. Kept in print in England throughout the 1930s, Love on the Dole was soon turned into a play with a hugely successful stage run, starting in Manchester and finishing brilliantly in London's West End. See Stephen Constantine, "'Love on the Dole' and Its Reception in the 1930s," Literature and History 8 (Autumn 1982): 2 32-47
2. Greenwood boasted that, by 1940, 3 million playgoers, including the King and Queen, had seen the dramatic version. Letter to the Manchester Guardian (26 February 1940), 10
3. The story took three forms in the 1930s: the novel put its emphasis on Harry and his desire for masculine self-sufficiency. The play, written by Greenwood in collaboration with Ronald Gow, shifted the emphasis to Sally, though it changed few of the novel's crucial events. The dramatic version was then rewritten for an American audience, but again M-Ost of the scenes and dialogues remained faithful to the novel. See Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (HarM-Ondsworth, 1969)
4. Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (London, 1935)
5. and Love on the Dole: A Play in Three Acts (London, 1936)
6. British Board of Film Censors, "Scenario Reports," 1936, British Film Institute Library, London, 42, 42a
7. "Even if the book is well reviewed, and the stage play had a successful run, I think this subject, as it stands, would be very undesirable as a film." Ibid., 42
8. Quoted in Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939 (London, 1984), 90
9. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 112
10. Constantine makes the case that Greenwood's novel and the dramatic version were not actually radical at all: they were popular with middle-class audiences in the 1930s precisely because the plot merely emphasized a value that could never ruffle middle-class complacency-respectability. But although it is true, as Constantine maintains, that Greenwood's work refrains from condemning the bourgeoisie as responsible for poverty and unemployment and fails to advocate either trade union activity or outright revolution, it certainly offer a stark critique of government indifference and slum-dwelling despair. And in barring it from the cinema, the British Board of Film Censors made it clear that the plot's endorsement of respectability was not enough. See '"Love on the Dole' and Its Reception in the 1930s," 232-47
11. Richards, The Age of the. Dream Palace, 122
12. Nicholas Pronay, "Introduction," in Propaganda, Politics, and Film, 1918-45, ed. Nicholas Pronay and D. W. Spring (London, 1982), 15
13. Quoted in Nicholas Pronay, "The Political Censorship of Films in Britain between the Wars," in Pronay and Spring, Propaganda, Politics, and Film, 1918-45,122
14. Keep Tour Seats Please (1936)
15. For example, A. Jympson Harman, "New West-End Films," Evening News, 30 May 1941, 2
16. Moore Raymond, "New Films," Sunday Dispatch, 1 June 1941, 2
17. Jonah Barrington, "New Film," Daily Express, 31 May 1941, 2
18. "Love on the Dole: An Outstanding Film," The Times, 30 May 1941, 6
19. Edgar Anstey, "The Cinema," Spectator, 6 June 1941, 607
20. There is little scholarly consensus about how to define the term propaganda, in part because the scholars who have considered the subject come from an array of fields, including psychology, sociology, communications, history, literary criticism, rhetoric, and even philosophy. There are long-standing debates about whether propaganda always entails falsehood; whether it is always pernicious; and whether it is defined as emanating only from the state-or whether it could include media, education, bureaucracy, and advertising. For a recent account of these debates, see Garth Jowett and Victoria O' Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1999), 1-34
21. John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World: Mexico, China, Turkey (New York, 1929)
22. Elmer J. Ellis, Education against Propaganda (Philadelphia, 1937)
23. In Europe, French sociologist Jacques Ellul ushered in a whole new attention to propaganda in the social sciences in the early 1960s, with his Propagandes (Paris, 1962)
24. Arthur Ponsonby, M.P., Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated throughout the Nations during the Great War (New York, 1928; and London, 1929)
25. H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914-17 (Nor-man, OK, 1939), vii, 326
26. See also James Duane Squires, British Propaganda at Home and in the United States from 1914 to 1917 (Cambridge, 1935)
27. Richard S. Lambert, Propaganda (London, 1938), 12
28. British Institute of Public Opinion, "Public Opinion during the Week Ending 30th September 1939," TNA: PRO INF 1/261
29. James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State, and Propaganda, 1939-1945 (London, 1998), 46
30. F. C. Bartlett, Political Propaganda (Cambridge, 1940), 133
31. San Francisco Chronicle, 1 November 1939
32. Anstey, "The Cinema," Spectator, 6 June 1941, 607
33. "A Film to Shake Britain," Sunday Pictorial, 1 June 1941, 12
34. Ibid
35. Spectator, 6 June 1941, 607
36. Times, 30 May 1941, 6
37. Daily Express, 31 May 1941, 2
38. "Minister's Memorandum on General Polity" (30 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848
39. For a fascinating account of British efforts to influence U.S. attitudes toward the war, see Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American "Neutrality" in World War II (New York, 1995)
40. "Hamburg Broadcast Propaganda," TNA: PRO INF 1/867, 1, 14, 16
41. "Hamburg Broadcast Propaganda," TNA: PRO INF 1/867, 16
42. Lambert, Propaganda, 12
43. Bartlett, Political Propaganda, 8
44. "Themes on which Ministerial Statements Are Desirable" (October 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/ 867
45. "Two Films of the Month," Documentary News Letter, July 1941, 135
46. Taylor, "Introduction," 9
47. Chapman, The British at War, 182
48. Peter Stead, "The People as Stars: Feature Films as National Expression," in Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, ed. Philip M. Taylor (Houndmills, UK, 1988), 66
49. A. E. Wilson, "Slump Film Is Uplifting," The Star, 29 May 1941, 6
50. Ian Coster, "This Film Is One of Britain's Best," Evening Standard, 31 May 1941, 6. The reporter added: "It even has the courage to avoid a happy ending."
51. "Film Notes," News of the World, 1 June 1941, 6
52. Dilys Powell, Films since 1939 (1947)
53. P. L. Mannock, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 September 1939, 19
54. Philip M. Taylor contends that it was the low British opinion of propaganda that led to the slow development of propaganda techniques: see The Projection of Britain (Cambridge, 1981)
55. And more recently, Cull makes the case that the "early failures of the MoI became legendary" for good reason: the appointment of Lord Macmillan as Minister, who had no publicity experience whatsoever, was particularly damaging. See Cull's Selling War, 38-39
56. "The Movies," New Statesman and Nation, 7 June 1941, 578
57. Love on the Dole, vidéocassette, directed by John Baxter (London: British National Films, 1941; distributed by Video Yesteryear, 1998)
58. British Board of Film Censors, "Scenario Reports," 1936, British Film Institute Library, London, 42
59. For further discussion of British film and wartime propaganda, see Jo Fox's article in this issue, "Millions Like Us? Accented Language and the 'Ordinary' in British Films of the Second World War," Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006): 819-45