Yield to the Night

Some time back TCM ran a night of the movies of British bombshell Diana Dors. They included some movies in which Dors wanted to show she could be a truly serious actress, such as Yield to the Night (released in the US as Blonde Sinner).

The movie starts off with an interestingly-shot sequence of a woman going through London, shot mostly from below so we never really see her face clearly. She inserts a key into a door, but decides not to go in. Another woman gets out of a car, and the first woman pulls out a gun, shooting her dead and making no attempt to escape.

The woman who committed the shooting is, as you can probably guess, played by Dors, a woman named Mary Hilton. After the opening sequence, we fast-forward to a couple of weeks before Hilton's scheduled execution. She's housed in a surprisingly big cell in the women's prison, with two warders watching her at all time. There's not much to do, so Mary is alone with her thoughts, leading her to think about how she wound up in the situation she's in.

Flash back some time. Mary is a woman in a failing marrriage, working as a perfume-counter saleslady at a posh shop in London. One day, nightclub pianist and giver of private lessons Jim Lancaster (Michael Craig) somes in, looking for a particular perfume to which he doesn't know the name, only the smell. Mary is able to find it for him,

Mary begins to fall in love with Jim, although the feeling is only partly mutual. Jim is the sort of man who for whatever reason simply can't be faithful to one woman. He eventually meets Lucy, who can give Jim something Mary cant, which is money. So he starts a relationship with her, basically trying to separate her from her money, all the while stringing naïve Mary along.

In between the flashbacks, we get a lot of looks at Mary's daily life in prison, an unchanging ritual of meeting the governor, the various warders, the doctor, and the chaplain. She gets a few visitors in the form of her family and the philanthropic Mrs. Bligh (Athene Seyler), but it does nothing to lessen Mary's feelng of impending doom.

I found Yield to the Night to be quite good, although of course there is a bit of a problem in that the characters aren't the nicest people. Mary shot an innocent woman in cold blood, and Jim was a nasty little chancer. But the prison scenes are quite good, even if a bit disturbing at times. Death row is handled as a very mundane experience of waiting for one of two things, either a stay or the actual execution.

Yield to the Night did get a DVD release in the UK, but that's a Region 2 DVD and won't play in the US unless you have a region-free player (sadly, I don't). These movies really need a release in the US.