Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a 1931 black-and-white 'talkies’ cinema advertisement in which the life of a worn-out housewife is transformed by a new washing powder. The story begins with an invitation to the woman and her husband to play bridge the following Monday (washing day).The husband is then seen telling a friend about his concern for his wife, as 'housework is getting her down’. The two wives enter the room, all smiles because one has introduced the other to a new way of washing. In the final scenes the wife extols the wonders of Rinso for getting the washing clean without hard rubbing.

Educational value points

• This cinema advertisement follows the classic structure of an imaginative text (in this case, a filmed story) – orientation, complication, resolution. The opening scenes introduce the middle-class characters and the domestic location. The complication of the housewife’s exhaustion is described by the woman herself and confirmed by discussion among the men. The resolution is shown in the happy family scene cutting to an almost full-screen depiction of the Rinso packet.

• Commonly accepted gender roles of the 1930s are depicted in the advertisement, the wife being shown as a housewife responsible for the weekly washing, tied to her housework routines. The husband earns the household income. Although he is concerned by his wife’s tiredness and then relieved by the advent of Rinso, the unvoiced expectation is made clear that, despite what he says, the husband will never do the washing. This was the role of the wife and mother.

• The advertisement’s title, 'Then Came Happiness’, was not intended to be ironic. Housewives in the 1930s were believed to be focused on domestic duties to such a degree that a new washing powder could indeed bring happiness to their lives. It was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that attitudes such as this were challenged by a renascent feminist movement and women began to object to advertisers trivialising and sentimentalising household work in the way depicted here.

• The clip is an example of an early cinema advertisement featuring sound, with the actors’ delivery reflecting both the early years of 'talkies’ and Australia’s close ties to Britain. The staged nature of the dialogue indicates the problems and uncertainties of actors and technicians getting used to the new sound medium. Although the advertisement was made in Australia, no effort was made to reflect this – rather the actors’ English accents link the film closely to England.

• 'On-screen’ 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 to the emergence of 'soap operas’.

• Washing machines did not become widely accessible in Australia until after the Second World War, before which washing could take an entire day or longer. On wash day (generally Monday) clothes were boiled in a copper tub, rubbed on a scrubbing board, perhaps washed again, rinsed in clean water once or twice, wrung out (through a wringer or by hand) and hung out to dry on long lines propped up by 'clothes props’.

• The high level of middle-class formality in Australia in the 1930s is evident in the clip. At a bridge night among friends the men wear formal suits, white shirts and ties, while the women wear formal dresses with a mid-calf hemline, and necklaces.

• The advertisement features the Rinso brand of soap powder, introduced into Australia after the First World War. Rinso was manufactured by Unilever from 1918 and was one of the first mass-marketed soap powders, taking the place of soap cut from a bar. Such powdered soaps were used until the introduction of heavy-duty detergents in the late 1940s. Sales of Rinso dropped during the 1950s and the product was removed from the market in the mid-1970s.