Rent Women of Twilight (1952)

Nine Months' Tenancy - Women of Twilight review by CH

Another dawn becomes another morning when a prospective knock on the door of another boarding house yields another landlady with that trademark steely gaze which heralds a refusal. So it might seem as Women of Twilight (1952) first rises upon the screen a decade before The L-Shaped Room.

There is, on this occasion, another dimension to so familiar a setting. Before there were the Angry Young Men there was an angry young woman: Sylvia Rayman. While eking out life as a waitress, she had worked on an all-women play first staged in small theatres the previous year. Its appearance on the screen overlapped with continuing stagings in the West End and on Broadway - and was something of a contrast with Coronation year.

With a tremendous set of performances, the film is mostly set in a basement - and plumbs depths a world away from those waving flags at the side of the Mall. Some miles away and far from regal, a uniquely sour landlady Freda Jackson is a veritable Borgia. Under the guise of A charitable disposition, she offers unmarried mothers lodgings which are, did the tenants but realise it, her first step in baby-farming their offspring for adoption. Thankful to find at last somewhere to ease her feet and growing womb, Rene Ray has not only a birth to face but a death. Each day she attends the trial for a murder committed by the father-to-be. The film adds the man himself, one of Laurence Harvey’s early appearances - which here finds him singing, at any rate painfully dubbed, on a night club’s small stage. Rather more resonant is their meeting again either side of a prison visiting room’s glass partition.

Rather more dialogue takes place between those well-nigh imprisoned in the boarding house as it to becomes clear to Rene Ray what lies beyond all this. Allegiances are formed as events and births - and untoward deaths - occur while cash changes hands for infants as soon as practicable after their nine-month tenancy of the womb is up.

That such a play was being staged at a time when legend has it that all was drawing-room comedies waiting to swept aside by Osborne and others is evidence that one should not set undue store by the demarcation lines of history. More is always going on, and here is a version of a boarding-house play that one should like to see on the boards.