A year after crime-of-passion murderess Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, Associated British-Pathé released Yield to the Night (1956), a fictionalized summing up of that notorious and divisive cause celebre starring Diana Dors in a career making (but sadly not career defining) star turn as doomed grudge killer Mary Hilton.

Diana Dors had known Ruth Ellis from the London club scene, making Yield to the Night a personal project for the RADA-trained actress. Throughout her life, "the Siren of Swindon" would devote herself to humanitarian causes, with a special focus on the inmates of British prisons. She successfully used her celebrity status to lobby for increased visitation rights for the loved ones of the incarcerated and sent a letter of sympathy and support to the family of Derek Bentley, the 19-year-old epileptic would-be burglar who was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in 1953 for a crime committed by his underage accomplice. (This gross miscarriage of justice was the subject of the songs "Bentley and Craig" by June Tabor, "Let Him Dangle" by Elvis Costello and the 1991 Peter Medak film Let Him Have It). The role of Mary Hilton is a perfect fit for Dors, hoping in vain to escape the label of "the British Marilyn Monroe." Her beauty riding the razor's edge between zaftig and overweight, Dors was as child-like as she was womanly, and is here alternatively alluring and pathetic as the condemned woman whose life between sentencing and execution becomes a bizarre ritual of maintenance and regulation: no more than 10 cigarettes a day, no matches, no forks, no nail clippers, no letters from outside longer than a single page and no lights out… ever.

Yield to the Night swings wide of the known facts of the Ellis affair in a number of significant ways, hedging its bets in an apparent bid to make Mary Hilton more sympathetic. While Ellis, the mother of two, was a nightclub hostess and part time actress (who had in fact appeared as an extra in the 1951 British Lion Film Corporation production Lady Godiva Rides Again, costarring Diana Dors in a supporting role), Mary Hilton is depicted as a childless and unhappily married shop girl staffing the perfume counter of a posh specialty store. The biggest deviation from the facts comes with Mary gunning down not the man who done her wrong (as Ruth Ellis had done to bisexual race car driver David Blakely on Easter Sunday 1955) but rather the tragic affair's other woman, whose face is never shown. Thompson and veteran cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (whose long and distinguished career includes gigs on Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey, George Lucas' Star Wars and John Badham's Dracula) capture the events in canted angles and Greg Tolland-style deep focus photography that fetishizes hands and feet and inanimate objects such as tea cups and burning cigarettes that evoke a suitably sensual world full of wonder, yearning and anguish.

Even though Yield to the Night seems a heartfelt call for the end of capital punishment in the United Kingdom (which came nine years later, in 1965), Thompson and his writers avoid the obvious tack of demonizing society, preferring instead to focus on the rather sad task handed to those entrusted with the custodianship of Mary Hilton: her lawyer (Charles Lloyd Pack), her doctor (Liam Redmond, whom you may know from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken), the prison chaplain (The Third Man's Geoffrey Keene) and the squadron of officers (among them, second-billed Yvonne Mitchell) who monitor Mary's every waking moment. If scorn is affixed to anyone in Yield to the Night, it's to the heartless thrillseekers who toy with the affections of the lovelorn. Even Mary's often cruel lover, Jim Lancaster (Mysterious Island's Michael Craig) is depicted as ultimately powerless in the grip of his passions, as tragic a figure in his own way as Mary Hilton, who will shortly him to the grave.

There's nothing weak or bleeding heart in the compassion and decency of Yield to the Night. The film is peopled by lost souls feeling their way in the dark. Towards the end of the film, Mary accepts a tender embrace from matron MacFarlane, who has recently lost her own mentally unstable mother, the only person in her life, and offers Mary the simple observation "We all, all of us die some morning." The sharp faced, dark-eyed Yvonne Mitchell is well cast opposite Dors and a knowledge of both actresses' later careers adds an unintended layer of poignancy to this scene. Like Dors, whose later life was taken up with appearances in junk like Beserk! (1967) and The Amorous Milkman (1975), Mitchell was a talented stage actress whose rent-paying film work (Crucible of Horror, Demons of the Mind) was often leagues beneath her. Yvonne Mitchell died in 1979 of cancer, a disease that would claim Diana Dors' life five years later.

Yield to the Night is unavailable in the United States but, for those with multi-region players, a nice looking print is available as a Region 2 DVD from Optimum Home Entertainment as part of their Optimum Classics Collection.

Ruth Ellis' story was told in the film Dance with a Stranger (1985), starring Miranda Richardson.  Ellis also appears as a character (played by Mary Stockley) in Pierrepoint (2005), a potrait of British hangman Albert Pierrepoint, played by Timothy Spall.