Rent Yield to the Night (1956)

Blonde on Borrowed Time - Yield to the Night review by griggs

For a film that opens with a daylight shooting, Yield to the Night is surprisingly quiet and humane. J. Lee Thompson keeps things tight and unfussy, locking us in the condemned cell with Mary as the clock ticks down. Flashbacks seep in like unwelcome memories, slowly sketching how a besotted lover became a tabloid “murderess”, as the headlines happily branded her.

Diana Dors is superb, stripping off the sex-symbol image and cycling through brittle humour, rage, blind panic and that horrible, hollow calm without ever grandstanding. In the past she’s soft and open; in the present she’s clenched and watchful, already halfway erased. Around her, the women’s prison staff – especially Yvonne Mitchell’s quietly kind warder – create an atmosphere of everyday horror: tea trays, small talk, and the unseen gallows.

The style brushes against noir, all shadows and narrow corridors, but the politics are clear. You feel the Ruth Ellis era closing in as the film calmly, firmly asks whether state killing can ever be called justice.

Well acted Warning - Yield to the Night review by RP

Diana Dors is often remembered by the roles she played later in life. But this film reminds us what a good actor she was. The film has a cast that makes every part, big or small, meaningful and important. The story of a good girl driven bad is not so interesting as the scenes in the prison itself. The Prison Guards waiting with the condemned criminal. Passing the time, with their own small bits of life and interests. While awaiting the all too meaningless waste. Often over looked but a film that should be among the very best of classic British cinema.

Death Row. - Yield to the Night review by Steve

This is an odd blend of genres but most potently a protest film which makes a case against the death penalty. Diana Dors plays a shopgirl who murders her boyfriend's rich lover. It relates her last few days in a procedural narrative style, before she hangs. But it also feels like film noir, with the voice over, flashbacks and expressionist photography.

It is most remembered for the casting of DD as the guilty woman. She gives a competent, subdued performance outside her usual range. Her face is scrubbed of makeup and her rather blank ordinariness is emphasised. This is no monster. The implication is that the murder was temporary insanity. But the character is so passive it's a struggle for the star to sustain interest.

Compare the dynamism of Susan Hayward in the similar but superior I Want to Live! two years later. There are parallels between Yield to the Night and the hanging of Ruth Ellis in 1955. Director J.Lee Thompson points out that the source novel by Joan Henry preceded the Ellis case, but the film came after and the publicity must have been influential.

So, the release was topical. But not influential; the death penalty remained for another 13 years. Thompson directs with a flourish and the b&w photography is artistic. Yvonne Mitchell gives a typically nuanced performance as a sympathetic screw. But the appeal of the film rests heavily on Diana's stunt casting, and she just about pulls it off.