During 1944, Greenwood was working on a new play about the modest but decorated Sergeant Jack Hardacre returning to his mother’s house in Salford on home leave for the first time in three years, having been fighting overseas in North Africa and Italy during that time. This was absolutely accurate as audiences would immediately have recognised – it was understandably not considered practical, nor very safe, frequently to bring servicemen and servicewomen home from distant theatres of war for short home leaves, and this inevitably resulted in long absences from family, at worst resulting in permanent family disintegration, and at least in the need to reintroduce yourself to your nearest and dearest who had themselves inevitably been changed by conditions on the home front just as combatants had been changed by their experiences in the Services and at the fighting front. Towards the end of the war, home leave began to be more possible for those with long service overseas. In fact in the film, Jack is not ordered to go back overseas, but is posted to the local barracks as an instructor for new recruits (a posting he is not keen on).
As with Love on the Dole eleven or so years earlier, Greenwood wavered over the title. What finally became The Cure for Love: a Lancashire Comedy in Three Acts, was first performed as The Rod of Iron at Oldham Repertory Theatre in January 1945, before being advertised as The Sergeant’s Mess in the Stage, 8th March, 1945, p.6 (Parkwood Productions sought ‘Big Theatres – Once or Twice Nightly’), and then stabilising as The Cure for Love at the Westminster Theatre production, London in July 1945. The original Rod of Iron title pointed attention to Jack Hardacre’s mother who still rules her household with a rod of iron despite her heroic son’s return (indeed the whole play is interested in female dominance – sometimes seen positively, sometimes not). The second title, The Sergeant’s Mess, I have always thought is much better than the final Cure for Love title, its use of a pun about Army life focusing on the fact that Jack left certain things behind him unresolved when he joined up and to which he now must, very reluctantly, return.
The major ‘mess’ he is in is that he weak-mindedly agreed to an engagement into which he was tricked by a neighbour’s daughter, Janey Jenkins. He never cared for her but was too shy to dispute her assertion that she was engaged to him after she bought herself an engagement ring with some money Jack won in a boxing match and gave to her. On his return on leave this situation is made worse by his instantly falling for his mother’s wartime billetee, Milly Southern, who has been directed into munitions work in Salford. Given Greenwood’s key past and continuing association with ‘northernness’, the play’s preference for the southern over the northern romance partner is somewhat surprising; however since Milly is a cockney, at least Jack has not ‘deserted’ his class origins. Milly is partly attracted by Jack’s Lancashire dialect, and also by his crucial performance of a Lancashire dialect poem at several key points in their romance, which makes clear his feelings without him quite having to take the plunge himself:
No lordly house of t’ countryside’s
So pleasant to my view,
As th’ little corner where abides
My bonny lass an’ true;
An’ there’s a nook beside yon spring, —
An’ if thou’lt share’t wi’ me;
I’ll buy thee th’ bonniest golden ring
That ever thee did see!
So, Mary, link thi arm i’ mine.
This is the second verse of a poem by the Lancashire dialect poet Edwin Waugh (1817-1890). It was clearly a favourite with Greenwood who also included it in a selection of Lancashire poems at the end of his 1950 book titled Lancashire (pp. 283-5). Greenwood says there that he has modified the poem’s original dialect to make it easier for ‘those unfamiliar with local usage’ (p. 281). It is his modified version which is also used in the film (for the original see https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55921/pg55921-images.html#Page_15 ; for an introduction to Edwin Waugh see his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Waugh ).
Milly during her stay up north has also adopted some Lancashire turns of speech, though Jack still thinks he has never met anyone quite like Milly before. In the end Milly helps him to become a little more assertive in domestic circumstances and to put his real wishes ahead of obedience to convention and conformity: he breaks away from his mother and Janey and marries Milly (though secretly – his developing assertiveness is not always very bold). For a fuller discussion of the relation of the play to its late-war / just post-war context see my Walter Greenwood and the Beveridge Report (1941-1945) *.
Walter Greenwood formed a partnership with the very successful stage and film actor Robert Donat to bring the play to a London production and in due course to a film adaptation. Donat, with his established theatre and film star status, contributed a great deal to this partnership, including playing the hero, as well as a considerable financial investment, and remained a life-long friend (though for an account of some ups and downs see my Walter Greenwood and Robert Donat ). The play had some mixed reviews, especially from London-based theatre critics, but was a reasonable success in the theatre. An edition was published by Samuel French (French’s Acting Edition No.2102) in 1947.
The film was directed by Donat himself (the first film he had directed) with a script mainly by Greenwood. It was produced by London Films, and like the play starred Donat as Sergeant Jack Hardacre, while also featuring Dora Bryan as Janey Jenkins, and Renée Asherson as Milly Southern. Sources sometimes give 1949 as the release date and sometimes 1950 – both are reasonable since the film had a London release on 29 December 1949 and a general British release on 6 February 1950. (1) Mixed reviews also greeted the film, including the Film Bulletin‘s verbless and shortest-ever notice: ‘Ante-diluvian regional farce’ (Vol 17, no.193, January-February 1950, p.8: http://(http://www.screenonline.org.uk/media/mfb/1083496/index.html). Dora Bryan recalled in her memoir that the press preview of the film ended with an embarrassing and complete silence on the part of the film critics, and that the entire cast with the exception of Donat left quietly and very downcast, expecting the film to be a failure (According to Dora, 1986, revised 1996, pp.63-4).
Kinematograph Weekly was mainly negative in its guidance for cinema managers, and as so often took a metropolitan perspective, seeing the film as likely to have success only in the provinces and ‘industrial areas’:
WARTIME romantic comedy, spoken with a broad Lancashire brogue. Based on Walter Greenwood’s play about a sergeant who is all but ensnared by a trollop, it contains a few obvious laughs, but is seldom witty and never illuminating. Robert Donat is producer, director, star and part author, but the prodigious one-man band fails to conceal the film’s stage heritage. At best, a very simple round of fun. Title and star booking, mainly for industrial and provincial audiences.
Production. – The picture, rather like an old-time music hall sketch in its characterisation and make-up, suffers from indifferent, or rather inexperienced, direction. Robert Donat has about as much as he can manage as leading player and his preoccupation cramps the film’s growth. Stunted development emphasises the staginess of its types and the transparency of its humour. Without going highbrow, it should have made much more of its rich and storied locale. Even slapstick needs firm and colourful background (5 January 1949, p. 19).
The Manchester Guardian film reviewer (specifically and significantly ‘Our London Film Critic’) likewise thought the film suffered from all too obvious under-adaptation from its stage origins, though too thought it might do well with the uncritical or ‘unexacting’ as he termed them:
The Cure for Love has become as stagey a film comedy as could be imagined . . . one was repeatedly conscious of the rise and fall of the invisible curtain. Mr Donat in all probability simply did not care; he probably reckoned that, like George Formby, and in defiance of all the canons of sound filmcraft, he had produced something which would amuse large unexacting sections of the public. And like George Formby’s film-sponsors, he may well be right (December 31, 1949, p.3).
Donat had put great personal effort and finance into making sure that Greenwood’s play was filmed, and anyway the alleged cynicism seems uncharacteristic of an actor and producer who always seemed a careful artist. Indeed Picturegoer, reporting on the making of the film, his ‘quadruple role as scriptwriter, producer, director’ and a delay caused by Donat’s ill-health (severe asthma – then pretty much untreatable) quoted him exactly to this effect:
I want to be able to see this film when it is finished as an artist might look at one of his completed canvases – critically, naturally – but happy in the knowledge that this is entirely my own work (23 July 1949, p.8).
Moreover, beyond helping his friend Greenwood to launch a post-war theatrical success, Donat had another substantial motive for making the film, which made the choice of a home-grown and ‘regional’ story especially appropriate: he wanted to support and expand the British film industry and show that it could compete with Hollywood productions while deploying much more modest budgets appropriate to austerity Britain. This was the context of Donat’s meeting and follow-up correspondence with the then President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson. Donat makes clear the seriousness of his work and seems to have been carefully listened to by Wilson who said he looked forward to seeing the film (letters held by the University of Manchester Library, reference GB 133 FRD1/1/473, dated 14 December [Donat] and 23 December [Wilson] 1949). In his letter Donat gently asserts the quality of the film:
My aim and ambition was the making of a quality film at low cost. I think you will find that I have made a film of considerable quality at what might have been a remarkably low figure . . . Anyway, I hope one day you will find time to see this film, having its roots in the Lancashire we both know so well, and judge for yourself. I honestly believe it gets nearer to a slice of truly British life and character than any British comedy that has appeared so far. I cannot speak of my own performance, but there is no doubt whatever that the other performances are of the highest possible order (quoted in J. C. Trewin, Robert Donat: a Biography, Wiliam Heinemann, London, 1968, p. 188 – the figures below come from the same page).
In fact, Donat was ill during filming and this led to delays and extra costs and may have affected the final coherence of the production (though I do not see this myself in the finished film). Donat explains to Harold Wilson that overall the film cost £175,000, but that his period of illness added about £45, 000 of this sum. The US professional entertainment magazine Variety thought the film would do well in Britain but said there would be a large financial impact from these production delays, as well as concluding that the film would not work at all in the States because of the Lancastrian dialect and so might well register an overall loss (whole review available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/variety177-1950-01/page/n306/mode/1up?view=theater).
Despite negative reviews in London (and Manchester . . .) the film was indeed a considerable success in northern cinemas being screened, for example, for eighteen weeks running in Newcastle (as Dora Bryan again recalled – for more detail see Walter Greenwood and Dora Bryan * ). For audiences which did enjoy the film, the music-hall heritage may have played a part in conjunction with the topical relevance of homecoming given that demob played an important part in family life and the domestic experiencing of the end of war and the beginning of post-war from 1945 till 1947. In the north the Lancashire setting, dialect and humour may well have sold the film, as well as the star cast (pretty much all of northern origin with the exception of Asherson), and the film might also have built on the great success of the play in the north, where during 1949 in addition to a professional touring production starring Wilfred Pickles, there were also many repertory and amateur stage productions. The film critic C.A. LeJeune, who had clearly been present at the critics’ preview, mounted a robust defence of the film against its metropolitan detractors, arguing that southerners just did not understand what kind of film it was nor understand its northern humour. They wanted the film to be about the north as they had learnt to understand it through documentary (and perhaps too through films like Love on the Dole?), but this is a comic film of Lancaster by northerners and for northerners:
I have been deeply touched, and just a fraction amused, by the friendly efforts of metropolitan and south-country colleagues to protect us northerners against The Cure for Love, Robert Donat’s screen version of Walter Greenwood’s Lancashire comedy. When I came out of the press-show, full of a rich and secret enjoyment, my London colleagues clustered round with well-meant apologies. The film, they said, was of course fictitious. Real Lancashire people were quite different, naturally. The local types, they said, were obviously burlesques, the sets were artificial and not realistic, there was no attempt at all, what a pity, to approach the subject documentarily. Some of the nicest of them, bless their big, warm hearts, waxed quite indignant about that. The secret of it all is, of course, that The Cure for Love is a joke for northerners by northerners. Both Walter Greenwood, who wrote the original play, and Robert Donat, who produced, directed, helped to adapt, and starred in it for the screen, are Lancashire lads. What they have done here is exactly what Gracie Fields has always done: taken the broad sense of humour of the North Country and worked it riotously at its own expense. The Cure for Love isn’t meant to be realistic or documentary, any more than the Rochdale Hunt is meant to be realistic or documentary. The whole thing is a fiction in the native idiom, done with the Lancashire tongue firmly fixed in the Lancashire cheek. Coming from Manchester myself – I was born only a few streets away from Robert Donat, and used to see him as a boy scorching along the pavements on a tricycle – I thought the film was prime fun. (The Sketch, 18 January 1950).
The Rochdale Hunt was a kind of Lancashire parody of Home County hunts – held after Christmas; a no-doubt choreographed Movietone News programme from December 1937 shows it as a comic race including a goat, a ha’penny farthing bicycle and several cart-horses: https://youtu.be/KPPWOA5c8uI?si=SGxdFT7RAlbgtcmz&t=23.
Barrow tells us that Donat invested the very substantial sum of £20,000 in the project, his entire earnings from the successful film of Terence Rattigan’s play, The Winslow Boy (director Anthony Asquith, London Film Productions, 1948, in which Donat had starred as the barrister Sir Robert Morton, Mr Chips – the Life of Robert Donat, London, p.162, 1985). I do not know whether Donat got a significant return on his investment in the end, but he never lost his faith in the value of Greenwood’s play.
Greenwood wrote or contributed to a number of films over his career, some notable, others less so. Though no-one has yet explored this, he was generally very lucky in his film work with the choice of composers for the film-music. In this case, the choice was William Alwyn (1905-1985), who was a prolific composer of ‘serious music’, sometimes but not mainly in avant-garde modes, and was also a keen and experienced composer of film scores: ‘his compositional output was varied and large and included five symphonies, four operas, several concertos, film scores and string quartets’ (from his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alwyn ). After the early death of his father, Alwyn had paid his way through the Royal Academy of Music (where he was later appointed Professor of Composition at the extraordinarily early age of twenty-one, in 1926) by playing the flute in cinema pit orchestras and later commented about his career as a composer that ‘he found film work a huge stimulus: it gave him the opportunity to experiment, to work with orchestras, and to confront in music a wide range of emotional scenarios’. (2) By 1949 Alwyn had already written scores for around twenty-four films, including some notable wartime and post-war successes such as They Flew Alone (1941), Squadron Leader X (1942), Desert Victory (1943), The Way Ahead (1944), The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Winslow Boy (1948, and, of course, also starring Robert Donat). He had also written scores for many documentaries including a number made by Walter Greenwood and his accountant James Park’s film company, Greenpark Ltd (Parkwood Productions mentioned above was another of their entrepreneurial partnerships). These included a quartet of films to inform city folk about the natural cycle and the key wartime contribution of agriculture: Spring on the Farm, Summer on the Farm, and Winter on the Farm, and The Crown of the Year (all 1943) as well as the post-war Greenpark production about the rebuilding of bomb-damaged London, Proud City – a Plan for London (directed by Ralph Keene, 1946: freely available to view via BFI Player: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-proud-city-a-plan-for-london-1946-online ).
A waltz theme is repeatedly used in the film of The Cure for Love to accompany scenes where Milly and Jack think about their at first unexpressed feelings for each other (and what Jack indeed regards as inexpressible feelings because of his ‘inescapable’ if forced pre-enlistment engagement to Janey Jenkins). There has been a quite recent book-length study of William Alwyn’s film music, which is of great assistance in writing about his approach to the medium, and indeed has some specific analysis of the music he wrote for The Cure for Love, including its waltz theme. This is Ian Johnson’s loving exploration, William Alwyn: The Art of Film Music (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2005). Johnson names Alwyn’s waltz tune as the main ‘theme’ of The Cure for Love, which it certainly is (p.38). He follows this up with more detailed analysis of how the waltz motif is used with ingenious variation as true film music, contributing to to the mood, rhythm, scene and character development of the film narrative itself:
There is one major motif, the love motif: for Milly alone and for Milly and Jack together. In the credit titles it perfectly expresses the film’s content, starting with the rhythm and harmony of a Northern music-hall, proceeding to the harmonies of a mechanical fairground organ, and finishing as a romantic slow waltz. Particularly effective is the diegetic use of the motif on the wireless, first to introduce the lovely Milly, later to suggest a potential romance as the couple makes small talk (pp.221-2).
The music for the film is indeed striking partly because, as a hostile critic (to whom we will return) noted, it was ‘a sparing background’: in scenes focussed mainly on dialogue there is no music at all, the music (mainly the waltz motif) being held back for short heightened moments of feeling between Milly and Jack, which are anyway often interrupted by other characters. In an early scene where Milly has just met the returning hero and is ironing her clothes in her petticoat in the front room (she and Sarah Hardacre have got used to it being a small and wholly female household in Jack’s absence), she indeed turns on the wireless, which is playing the waltz theme, first suggesting what she is beginning to feel. ‘Diegetic’ is a technical term indicating music within the narrative world, and which can therefore be heard by the film characters – as Johnson argues, it is indeed a clever and telling moment in the sound-scape of the film. Both the ‘sparing’ use of music and the popular form of the waltz itself were elements found unappealing by the hostile critic referred to above: he was Hans Keller and Ian Johnson found his comments about Alwyn’s film music in Music Review:
I have seen or heard no comment, let alone the overdue outcry, about the alarming fact that a leading member of our official musical institution par excellence, a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music who has quite rightly earned himself the reputation of being one of our most important film composers, has of late turned out not merely such indifferent scores as Golden Salamander and Madeleine [1949], but also such reeking Kitsch that forms, if form is the word, the admittedly sparing background to Cure for Love [sic] (May 1950, p.145, Johnson p.221). (3)
Keller is not criticising all film music, but despite Alwyn’s reputation, regards these particular scores as being inferior, particularly criticising ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ as lacking in form (in which there is some truth, though only if you disregard its function in the film). Johnson defends all three scores on the general and specific bases that the criticism ‘ignored the cultural context of the film medium . . . the film has warmth and charm, is funny and often tender [and] Alwyn’s contribution must be considered with that idiom in mind; northern, farcical, warm and sentimental’ (p.221). I would add that ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ is hardly courting popular favour – on the contrary, as I will argue below, it is hardly melodic at all – there are melodic fragments, but these are not sustained enough to make up what I think most listeners would consider a ‘tune’ – and I think it is as much influenced by art-music impressionism as dance music, nineteenth or twentieth-century.
Johnson goes on to analyse the use of music and sound in what is one of the most innovative sections in the film (and one reminiscent of some of the montage scenes in the 1941 film of Love on the Dole, including that which shows Harry Hardcastle and Helen enjoying their once in a lifetime trip to Blackpool). There is a phantasmagoric feel to this highly musical section of the film as locations and partners are rapidly swapped/cut between, so that as I watch it I am unsure whether this is taking place in reality or in Jack’s fevered imagination of his painful situation:
In a bravura scene, Jack and Janey, Milly and Sam do the town. But Jack and Milly are unhappily coupled with the wrong partners. The situation is summarised in a montage, starting with a close-up of Janey and Jack on the big dipper, she chattering incessantly, he looking distraught. The music, a fast theme distinguished not so much by its melodies as by harmonies reminiscent of the sound of travelling showmen, commences simultaneously with a high-pitched and unintelligible babble representing Janey’s stream of conversation. To the audience of the pre-tape-recorder period it must have seemed both adventurous and funny (p.222).
In a film judged overly theatrical and insufficiently filmic by some contemporary and later reviewers, it is good to note this use of highly cinematic techniques combining vision, sound and rapid narrative development. There are though aspects of the gender politics of this representation of the dominant and ‘talkative’ woman which I will discuss elsewhere – there is a sad and supressed story which only occasionally makes its voice heard above the comedy about Janey’s desperate need to ‘capture’ an unwilling husband in the legal framework of marriage. This suggests a lack of self-respect which is in contrast to Milly Southern’s secure self confidence, but how it feels from Janey’s perspective is never entered into in either the play or the film. (4)
Alwyn’s main motif in waltz form was clearly seen as a potential stand-alone piece and so given its own title, ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ and printed by Chappell & Co. in a sheet music edition for piano, presumably in the year the film was released.
I do not know whether this sheet music sold well or if ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ gained any measure of popularity (I have only seen two copies of the sheet-music for sale in the last decade, and as far as I can see it was not released as a 78 rpm record). ‘The Cure for Love Waltz’ has been helpfully described in a review of a CD of William Alwyn’s film music as a ‘mistily-dream-like waltz’ and indeed I am not certain it has a distinctive enough melody to become much of a hit in its own right. (5) Nevertheless, we are fortunate to have a resource available via Youtube to give us a sense of London Film’s ambitions for the film and indeed for its music. Even if there was no commercial record release for Alwyn’s waltz, what is now a very rare 78 rpm record for The Cure for Love was produced to be played in cinemas to promote this upcoming new release. The full 78 record is shared on YouTube by Andrew Oldham, together with some film posters for The Cure for Love:
It opens with an orchestral version of the waltz and then adds a whistled melody (though this is one version not included in the actual film sound-track). The waltz is then identified by the narrator as a key attraction of the film: ‘Do you like this tune? You know this is the kind of tune that you can’t help whistling whether you can whistle or you can’t’. As suggested above, I am rather unconvinced that this IS a catchy or whistle-able or memorable melody, but the promotion wants to identify it as such (though I note it does not identify its composer!). The promotional record was produced by Recorded Sound Ltd and was identified as RSL 399-0.
The ‘Cure for Love Waltz’ was recorded one further time in 2005 for the CD Volume 3 of The Film Music of William Alwyn (track 19, Chandos Records Ltd CHAN 10349) in a stand-alone arrangement by Philip Lane performed by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Rumon Gamba (Music Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra). The useful (unattributed) CD booklet notes give an account of the waltz very much consistent with those we have seen above (though of course some of the details refer to the CD’s manifestation of the waltz as a separate piece):
For this picture Alwyn provides a sentimental and graceful waltz, which appears in many guises throughout the film. It is scored for a conventional orchestra with the addition of a solo piano on which the main theme is played before the orchestra takes up the tune with embellishment from the harp (CD booklet, p.13).
I think we can reasonably observe that neither William Alwyn’s Waltz nor indeed the film of The Cure for Love itself have established a firm place in cultural memory, or to put that rather differently they have been forgotten through cultural neglect, perhaps largely stemming from the film’s original metropolitan reception. The much-appreciated Chandos recordings apart, it is difficult to experience this work by Greenwood, Donat, Asherson, Bryan and Alwyn and make up your own mind. There is no current DVD release of the film and it was never released as a VHS tape either, and it had very little afterlife on television: it has been shown only twice on British TV , on 17 July 1973 (BBC1) and 28 Feb 1976 (BBC2) though the good news is that it has recently made it to that home of rare old movies, Talking Pictures TV in summer 2025. (6) I think it was last screened by the BFI in 2008, so they clearly have a copy (the Robert Donat web-site has a helpful guide to which of his films are now available – despite Donat’s stage and film stature a surprising number are not published in anything like a decent version, or are completely unavailable, as is the case for The Cure for Love: https://robert-donat.com/videos/where-to-buy/).
My own view, based on rather few viewings for the reasons just given, and buoyed up by Lejeune and Johnson’s responses, is that The Cure for Love is an enjoyable film, with some traditional but engaging Lancashire comic motifs, a non-realist studio set with a style of its own, and a narrative which captures certain elements of a nearly the end of the war period, even if there are features which in both play and film are under-developed (especially Janey Jenkins’ motivations). In fact the play itself was slightly overtaken by events: the first performance was given four months before VE day on 8 May 1945, while the first London performance opened two months after the German surrender (though of course a month before the surrender of Japan on 14/15 August, and the celebration of VJ day on 2 September 1945). However, demobilisation, returning from overseas to the first home leaves in three or four years or more, and re-assimilating into changed family and romantic situations remained topical until the end of March 1947, by which time the majority of the nearly five million British wartime servicemen (and servicewomen) had been returned to civilian life. (8) Nevertheless, demobilisation and the return home would be a recent memory for millions of people, servicemen and servicewomen and their families alike. Equally important is Alwyn’s music for the film which seems to me innovative rather than ‘kitsch’, but which can only be properly judged as film music in the proper context of viewing the film. Some of the film’s early reception hangs over it but there are a number of (at the least) historical reasons for wishing to see it much more available for a contemporary audience to view: it was Greenwood’s first post-war film, it was Donat’s only film as director, as well as putting him into a working-class role unlike most of those he played, and if it did only suit ‘northern’ film tastes, should they not be recovered? If anything the film seems to me most like other ‘Manchester School’ comedies which made it onto screen and which are still in the viewable canon, even if they not at all like the glossier Hollywood feature films of the same period. I am thinking of the 1952 Hindle Wakes (based on a 1912 play by Stanley Houghton, directed by Arthur Crabtree, production by Monarch Film Corporation) and the 1954 Hobson’s Choice (based on a 1916 play by Harold Brighouse, directed by David Lean, production by London Films – Donat was originally to play the male working-class lead, Will Mossop, who has some similarities to Jack Hardacre in his lack of domestic self-confidence, but was too ill with asthma to do so, and was replaced by John Mills). (7) Both of these films are available as DVDs. In short, we need a good (preferably BFI) DVD edition of The Cure for Love so we can make our own judgements and comparisons about its place in the Donat and Greenwood canons, its writing, narrative, set-design, acting, ‘filmcraft’, its depiction of ‘northern’ Britain, what it might tell us about almost/just post-war Britain, AND its music by William Alwyn!
NOTES
Note 1. See the film’s Wikipedia entry for production facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure_for_Love.
Note 2. From his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry by Piers Burton-Page; first published in 2004, revised in 2024.
Note 3. Keller was an interesting musical intellectual inhis own right, thigh he could be provocative – see his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Keller.
Note 4. To be precise, I will revisit my existing article which has a substantial discussion of The Cure for Love and add further exploration of the gender politics of the play, and indeed of the gendered assumptions of the Beveridge plan – see (and then do revisit in due course) Walter Greenwood and the Beveridge Report (1941-1945) * .
Note 5. See the CD review by Ian Lace at the Music-Web International site: https://www.musicweb-international.com/film/2006/feb06/fm_walwyn.html.
Note 6. Information about TV showings kindly provided in an email (3 April 2024) by my Sheffield Hallam film colleague Dr Sheldon Hall from his database on TV screenings of feature films. His recent linked book, Armchair Cinema: a History of Feature Films on British Television 1929-1981 (Edinburgh University Press) was published in 2024: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-armchair-cinema.html .
Note 7. For introduction to these films see their Wikipedia entries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindle_Wakes_(1952_film) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_Choice_(1954_film)
Note 8. See Allam Allport’s excellent book Demobbed – Coming Home After the Second World War, Yale University Press, 2009, kindle edition, location 974.
Walter Greenwood: Not Just Love on the Dole 