Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a newly married couple (Muriel Howard and Albert Chappelle) on their honeymoon, settling into their bridal suite. They retell in song the story of how Persil washing powder brought them together and transformed a ‘drab and dreary’ Miss into a Mrs. The husband-and-wife duo, accompanied by sing-a-long subtitles and orchestra, unpack their suitcases of newly washed clothes before the wife happily reveals a box of Persil washing powder.

Educational value points

• The musical comedy genre that inspired this commercial and that the audience would have been familiar with has its roots in the operettas of the late 19th century, which evolved first into the stage musical comedies of Broadway and later into the musicals of the 1940s. Some were subsequently made into films, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma (1943), Carousel (1945) and South Pacific (1949). Musicals have fast-moving plots interspersed with songs, and the focus of the performance is on the musical numbers.

• This commercial demonstrates features of the musical film, as well as of the stage musical comedies that it derived from. For example, the actors deliver their performances to the camera as if there is a live audience watching them, often even speaking directly to the camera. Muriel Howard refers to the viewers as ‘them’, reminding her amorous husband that there are people watching, even in their honeymoon suite.

• ‘Onscreen’ advertisements were part of the cinema program from the beginning of cinema in the 1900s and often reflected the structures and conventions of feature films, communicating their messages in story form. The preference of soap companies for this style of advertising led to their later associations with radio and television dramas, and so the emergence of ‘soap operas’. Their Day provides an early and sedate example of the use of sex, subtly implied with suggestive winks, a cheeky clothing swap and an attempted smooch, to advertise a completely unrelated product.

• The husband and wife in this advertisement are played by popular theatre performers of the period, Muriel Howard and Albert Chappelle, both of whom had appeared in J C Williamson theatre productions. J C Williamson, who is credited with the musical arrangement for this advertisement, had a production company that staged musical theatre and operettas throughout Australia.

• Gender roles were clearly defined in the 1940s. Washing clothes was women’s work and Monday was traditionally seen as washing day in the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries. This day was spent boiling water in coppers, struggling with tubs and washboards, carrying wood and water, making starch, dealing with caustic substances and wringing heavy wet cloth. Washing was a physically demanding and time-consuming activity until the 1930s and 40s, when electric washing machines became available to those who could afford them.

• The Cinderella narrative of this commercial is just one of its persuasive techniques. Using Persil, it suggests, will win a woman a husband, bring her happiness, make her the envy of all the other girls and wives, and flood her world with gorgeous technicolour. It will also avail her of all the wonders of modern science. Washing powder commercials are ideal for advertising’s seductive, transformative fairytales, because every wash involves a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.