How a death-penalty thriller proved Diana Dors was more than just ‘Britain’s Marilyn Monroe’

At the start of Diana Dors’ career, she was constantly underestimated. Her formidable talent was wasted on lightweight films, and her whole vibrant persona usually sanded down to three words: ‘Britain’s Marilyn Monroe’.

At the end of her career, and even for years after her death, her tabloid-friendly personal life made her something of a punchline. But in between, there was a brief period where she showed what she could do with a weighty acting role, and how very much she deserved to be taken seriously. The crown jewel of that period was Yield to the Night (1956).

Dors plays Mary Price Hilton, who is on death row for killing her boyfriend’s mistress. Though there are some flashbacks which show the events that led up to the murder, mostly we remain with Mary in the present day in her jail cell, hoping for a pardon, and passing the days alongside the female guards who watch over her with varying degrees of sympathy.

An early-career J. Lee Thompson, who would later go on to direct The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Cape Fear (1962), was a stifled man in 1956. Like Dors, he was frustrated with the lightweight material he was being assigned; they’d worked together on several such films already, and in the process grown to like and trust each other.

Yield to the Night was borne of a collaboration with Thompson’s wife, Joan Henry. The two had met working on The Weak and the Wicked (1954), a prison drama which was based on Henry’s memoirs from her short stint inside for passing a fraudulent cheque (and also featured Dors in a supporting role). While that film was being shot, Henry wrote Yield to the Night first as a novel, and then adapted it for the big screen.

Thompson was eager to make a movie based around his opposition to the death penalty. Consensus was beginning to turn on capital punishment in Britain during the 1950s. There had been several highly publicised incidents, like those of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, of men executed for murder and later exonerated. The case of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, inspired an intense public outcry; she’s often falsely cited as the inspiration for Mary, although Henry’s novel was published before the crime for which Ellis was convicted took place.

As part of Thompson’s anti-death penalty message, he was determined that his heroine would have committed the murder, and be unrepentant about it, but that his film would illustrate that it was still wrong for the state to kill her. To be an impenitent murderer and to keep the audience on side would be a tough job for even an actor accustomed to weighty material – for someone whose screen roles had nearly exclusively been as eye candy, it was a formidable ask.

Nevertheless, Thompson’s lead exceeded all expectations. Henry’s textured screenplay took a de-glamourised Dors from the heady heights of a woman in love, to the lowest lows of someone awaiting the end. Despite the grave fate that awaits Mary, for the most part Yield to the Night is a quiet film that relies on the emotional dexterity of its star for a narrative engine. At every juncture, Dors was not just convincing, but compelling. It was a mammoth, and yet searingly intimate, performance.

While Yield to the Night was not a success at the box office, it was popular among critics on both sides of the pond, with Dors’ lead turn a big talking point. Sight and Sound praised her “honest, suffering performance”; Variety said “Miss Dors rises to the occasion and shows up as a dramatic actress better than anticipated.”; The New York Times: “Miss Dors will have to go far to beat this.” After almost a decade on the big screen, it looked as if she was finally being accepted as a proper actor.

It didn’t last. Although Dors said that Yield to the Night was the sole film of hers “[she] could point to with pride”,  she would get two or three more chances to prove what she could do – trucking noir The Long Haul (1957) and social issue drama Passport to Shame (1958) among the most interesting. But her short spell as a respected actor was soon forgotten. For the rest of her life – all the way up to and beyond her untimely death in 1984, at the age of 52 – she was largely considered little more than a good sport in a run of sex comedies and campy B movies, and fodder for the scandal sheets.

And yet 40 years after her death, as is so often the case with women who were undervalued by the media of their lifetimes, Dors’ career has undergone a belated reappraisal. Nearly 70 years since its original release, Yield to the Night proves that her talent was always there – it just took far too long for the world to catch up.

Yield to the Night screens as part of Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of British Cinema at BFI Southbank.