YIELD TO THE NIGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 934, 5 July 1957, Page 17

YIELD TO THE NIGHT

Bros.) . A Cert. V HAT is it like to wait in the condemned cell for the footsteps that may bring : reprieve when you know that if they bring instead (Associated British Warnet :

the end of hope you will go to bed one night soon for the last time and rise on a morning when your life will be taken at a known hour? Yield to the Night attempts to show us. It isn’t a plea either for or against hanging-it’s the story of what happened to one woman who shot and killed another in a ilove triangle. But it is, all the same, the sort of film that in referendum year might help New Zealanders to decide whether the death penalty is right or wrong. There was nothing to admire in Mary Hilton’s love affair: she had a busband, her murder was premeditated, she didn’t regret what she had done-and the film makes no special plea for her. Yet as I got to know her day by day in the condemned cell, my own emotions were pity and a growing horror that a fellow human was being watched and cared for only against the day when she would be taken next door and hanged. You may see it differently. Based on Joan Henry’s novel-whose story seems to echo. in some respects the Ruth Ellis case-this extraordinarily brave, honest, unsensational film was made by J. Lee Thompson, whose earlier prison story, The Weak and the Wicked, didn’t quite come off. It’s surprise is a remarkable performance by Diana Dors as the condemned woman. Apart from the startling prologue in which the murder is committed and the flashbacks which recall her love affair, she is stripped of glamour. Against the harsh background of the cell, under raw lights and in the eye of a camera which, often moves into close-up, she plays with great feeling and insight. There are good performances also by Yvonne Mitchell as a sympathetic prison officer, Athene Seyler as a prison visitor, Marie Ney as the prison governor; and Michael Craig is adequate as Mary’s lover.