Yield to the Night
J Lee Thompson (1956)
Yield to the Night is a virtually explicit anti-capital punishment tract. (In this respect and most others, it’s streets ahead of Losey’s Time Without Pity, made the following year.) The information on the screen at the start of the film is fascinating. I didn’t know that the House of Commons had voted to abolish hanging in both 1948 and 1955 (the latter more surprisingly, given the political make-up of the House then). On the first occasion the abolition clause in the Criminal Justice Bill was rejected by the House of Lords and the Attlee government didn’t seek to invoke the Parliament Act, presumably fearful of the unpopularity of doing so for the sake of this piece of legislation. I assume the same thing happened after the 1955 vote, which hadn’t been considered in the Lords at the time Yield to the Night, released in June 1956, was completed. The legend at the start concludes that a parliamentary decision to abolish the death penalty will eventually depend on public opinion (an irony given the widespread complaints by retentionists in more recent times that Parliament has continued to ignore the findings of opinion polls on the subject). The picture attempts, through its description of the last days of a young woman in the condemned cell in contemporary Britain, to change people’s minds in favour of abolition.
Although based on a 1954 novel by Joan Henry, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Cresswell, J Lee Thompson’s film might have been expected to gain commercial momentum because of the story’s superficial resemblance to the case of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in July 1955. So it was interesting to read in the BFI programme note, which included extracts from a biography of Diana Dors and from her autobiography, that the film, because its star was doing something different from what her public had come to expect, was a box-office flop[1]. Perhaps the resemblance to the Ruth Ellis story – or, at least, the story as it was told in Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger (1985) – is not all that superficial either. The best thing about Newell’s film and about Miranda Richardson’s interpretation of Ruth Ellis is how strongly they convince you that Ellis’s passion for the man she killed, David Blakely, was destructively inescapable. That’s an important element of the fateful love triangle in Yield to the Night too. Shop assistant Mary Hilton, who’s estranged from her dull, married-to-his-work husband Fred, is crazy about good-looking, embittered club pianist Jim Lancaster; Jim’s really in love with an older and wealthier woman, Lucy Carpenter, who rejects him. Although Diana Dors (Mary) is severely deglamorised in Yield to the Night, you still can’t help noticing that she, much more than Miranda Richardson, is the same physical type as Ruth Ellis. And Michael Craig, who plays Jim, would have been well cast as David Blakely if Dance to a Stranger had been made in the 1950s. Craig, as he shows here, can combine a strong masculine charm with a weak personality to great effect; the effete Rupert Everett, who played Blakely in the 1985 film, seems an expressionist study of the man’s depleted soul.
In the first half of Yield to the Night, you wonder if the prison scenes are going to become tedious – I found myself waiting for more flashbacks to the story of how Mary Hilton came to commit murder. But the film is skilfully constructed: the tedium of routine in the condemned cell, and the disjuncture between that tedium and the sudden end that awaits Mary, are an essential part of what makes the story grimly compelling. Once the flashbacks are done with and the prison sequences are uninterrupted, the sense that this is what Mary Hilton’s life has been inescapably reduced to is strongly claustrophobic. The script is acute in the way it shows the prison officials as understandably but ludicrously forward-looking: the warders compliment Mary on how her chess is improving; the doctor seems reassured that she’s got used to her prison diet. As soon as the news that the Home Secretary has decided against a reprieve finally comes through, this willed prospectiveness is extinguished as instantly as the light in the cell that Mary repeatedly begs to have switched off so that she can get some sleep. (Her requests are refused but the warders put a dark cloth over her eyes – although this is designed to give the prisoner some relief, it brings to mind the covering that will eventually be placed over her head by the hangman.) The routine gossip among the staff and the unintentional thoughtlessness of their chatter are well done too, although the moment late on when one of them warns Mary ‘She’ll catch her death’ registers too emphatically. There are persuasive details like Mary’s affection for the governor’s cat or the remark in her voiceover that, on the last afternoon of her life, she was almost glad to get back inside the prison so that she didn’t have to look at the sky any more. (When she returns to her cell, we see the cat sitting solitary in the yard outside.)
At the first appearance of a figure in long shot, gradually approaching the camera along a gloomy, narrow prison corridor, I wasn’t hopeful. But J Lee Thompson understands how to repeat a crime film trope like this often enough for it to transcend the cliché it started as: anticipating the arrival of news of the Home Secretary’s decision about a reprieve becomes so central to the narrative that the steps coming from the corridor start to sound in our minds along with Mary Hilton’s. Footsteps are important in Yield to the Night, which starts with high pressure music (Ray Martin’s melodramatic score is very effective throughout) and repeated pavement-level shots of high heels, getting in and out of cars, clicking ominously down the streets of London – shoes on a mission. Whenever the camera rises any height above the ground, the perspective of the street is severely tilted – to make clear that the woman wearing the shoes is seeing the world out of joint. The sequence culminates with one pair of heels confronting another: Mary shoots – and keeps shooting at – Lucy Carpenter. This opening demands and gets your attention too ostentatiously. Because you don’t know whose feet you’re watching (you can guess they belong to Diana Dors but her character doesn’t mean anything yet) the sharply-edited images come across as the director’s showing off. Even so, they have a resonance later in the picture. We never see Lucy (Mercia Shaw) head on – we only see her as a fur-coated corpse or in a back-to-side view when she is giving callously dismissive evidence at the inquest that follows Jim’s suicide. And we see her shoes on the carpet of the cosmetics shop where Mary works. Mary’s voiceover tells us it’s the shoes she always thinks of first when she thinks of Lucy, a well-heeled woman in every way.
It might be said to be a weakness of Yield to the Night that we don’t fully experience Mary’s sense of loss when Jim kills himself but I didn’t have a problem with this. I could accept that his death had a largely stunning effect until she witnessed Lucy in action at the inquest. We first see Mary in prison on the day her appeal has been turned down so it’s easy to believe that, from this point on, she sees herself as in a long-term relationship with death rather than Jim and that he has faded into the background. Your immediate reaction is to think Mary is a rather literary shop girl when she recites lines from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now … “) inside her head as she exercises in the prison yard but here too the script is careful and convincing: in a flashback, we see Mary looking at a copy of Housman in Jim’s bedsit (he’s an ex-teacher, who once had musical ambitions greater than playing a piano in a club). Mary also receives a book of writings and poetry from the prison chaplain and a line from this book provides the film’s title (although I can’t find its source[2]) – “for the night is already at hand and it is well to yield to the night”. Shortly after she reads this line, Mary exclaims ‘But I want to live!’, an amusing anticipation of the title of the Robert Wise picture of 1958 (complete with exclamation mark) which won Susan Hayward an Oscar for her performance as the convicted murderer Barbara Graham. I Want To Live!, if I remember rightly, climaxes with Hayward expiring in the electric chair. Given the abolitionist stance of Yield to the Night, it’s striking that we don’t witness Mary’s execution but Thompson does well to leave this to the imagination. One quibble, though: Mary Hilton is to be hanged on a Thursday morning. I thought it was standard practice in post-war England for hangings to take place on a Wednesday morning (Ruth Ellis’s certainly did, on 13 July 1955). It’s puzzling that Yield to the Night and Time Without Pity both make this same mistake.
This is meant to be the film that proves Diana Dors to be a fine dramatic actress – the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe’s Bus Stop (made in the same year). To my surprise, I now see what Dors’s admirers mean. She is uneven, her acting in some respects primitive. She seems to think she’ll get intensity into a line reading just by giving the odd word a hefty stress. She mostly speaks in that exasperating mid-Atlantic accent (was it taught to British Rank starlets to try and make them exportable?) She’s too aware that the dramatic stakes are high and sometimes affects an actressy voice that makes her sound not only wooden but as if English isn’t her native tongue. But in extremis – crying or shouting, or mute and numb-faced – she’s powerful. (She’s also good at the tart putdowns: when a warder asks who’s coming to see her today, Mary replies, ‘I don’t know – I haven’t looked at my engagement book’.) This is an example of a performance which is transformed by the strength of the performer’s commitment to what she’s doing and engagement with the character she’s playing. Once the backstory is told and the camera has nowhere to go but the condemned cell, the unadorned Diana Dors is under intense and sustained scrutiny and she’s utterly true.
Michael Craig was relatively inexperienced when he made this film and he speaks in the same unnatural way as Dors – when his voice occasionally registers real emotion it feels like it’s breaking out of a prison of its own. As Jim Lancaster, Craig is nevertheless expressive in spite of himself (or in spite of the way he’s been directed). As well as being physically right for the role, he succeeds in creating a very insecure and unhappy man. Jim’s suicide comes as a shock (I’d assumed Mary killed Lucy because Jim had deserted Mary for her, not because Lucy had caused his death) but it makes sense, thanks to Craig’s characterisation. Most of the smaller roles are well written (Henry and Cresswell’s dialogue is consistently sharp and credible) and well played, and Thompson shows a very sure touch in orchestrating the cast. The ‘Matrons’, as the warders are known, are believable both as belonging to a particular breed and as individuals. (They’re played by Olga Lindo, Mary Mackenzie, Joan Miller, Marjorie Rhodes and Mollie Urquhart.) The governor (Marie Ney), the doctor (Liam Redmond) and especially the prison chaplain (Geoffrey Keen) are much more nuanced characters than you might expect. Mona Washbourne is excellent as Jim’s landlady; so is Athene Seyler as a reformist prison visitor (like the chaplain, this is a religious character who’s treated with restraint and respect). The parts of Mary’s nearest and dearest are relatively clichéd. Dandy Nichols’s eccentricity carries her through as Mary’s mother, although there’s not much Harry Locke can do with the role of Mary’s husband. Her younger brother Alan is played by an actor called John Charlesworth, unknown to me but who seems to have been up and coming in British films and television in the mid- to late fifties. He committed suicide in 1960 at the age of 25.
Yvonne Mitchell (whom Thompson also directed in her best-known film Woman in a Dressing Gown) is superb as the warder who’s different-from-the-rest. Mitchell’s precise underplaying keeps the character of Hilda MacFarlane continually in the background and continually intriguing, with a hint of sexual ambiguity. When MacFarlane returns to work after the death of her mother, she opens up to Mary and talks about her spinsterly life outside the prison: the writing and playing of this exchange between Mitchell and Dors is very sensitive. It may not seem a great idea on the director’s part to have MacFarlane, as she bares her soul, sit building a house of cards; but when Yvonne Mitchell collapses them – with a deft, devastating hand movement – the timing is so perfect and the moment so expressive of MacFarlane’s misery that Thompson is vindicated. Mitchell also plays the scene in which MacFarlane says her last goodbye to Mary very well. The relationship between these two women is convincing: there’s a kinship between them and an unspoken understanding of its necessary limits.
3 March 2010
[1] In North America, there seem to have been more determined attempts to preserve Dors’s usual persona. The film was released as Blonde Sinner (‘The Man-By-Man Story of a Lost Soul!’) and the poster displayed Dors in entirely characteristic poses with the legend ‘Here She Is … That Eye-Filling, Gasp-Provoking Blonde Bombshell!’
[2] Postscript: It’s Homer. I discovered this thanks to Clive James’s poem ‘The Visitation of the Dove’, which quotes these words and was published in the New Yorker in December 2015.