Mesmerizing from beginning to end. Black and white photography, impeccable, giving you the feeling of the scene just by placing the camera in a position that exactly will tell you before hand what's coming. Amazing.

And then there is the actress.

She, unlike ANY actress of that period, appears most of the time with her face washed up and her hair with 4 inches of black roots, totally unconcerned with her looks for the camera, but she is ACTING. She is acting a storm, what an excellent actress!!

In the flash backs the actress becomes DIANA DORS... Fully done with platinum hair, made up to kill and slipped into a dress too tight to believe, it could be painted on her naked body.

The story takes its time to develop and little by little it starts building up the tension of her character. The timing is perfect, we get more and more involved with her suffering and waiting as anxiously as herself about her destiny.

I don't have words to tell you what a superb movie this is, a film that I think will be impossible to produce nowadays, maybe Charlize Theron came close to this type of character in "Monster", but the feeling of the movie is totally different, the results of the 50s are the results of a civilization gone with the wind.

To me, this movie is a masterpiece.

At the beginning of the film, you see Mary Hilton (Diana Dors) mercilessly unloading her gun into a woman. Why exactly she did this, you have no idea...nor who the victim was. The story soon switched to Death Row in a British prison and only a bit later are there flashbacks to let you have so idea of what you're missing in the story of this woman. I do know that nothing in the story made me feel sorry for her...and Mary's narration sometimes seemed to cast herself as a victim, of sorts. However, although the aim of the film appears to be to get the audience to care, as various prison folk talk about how bad the death penalty is or express a lot of empathy towards her. In fact, I would go so far as to say I wanted to see Mary hang for her actions and lack of regard for her murder....and so the film doesn't achieve its aim, at least for me. So, although the film excels at realism in some ways, it ultimately fails in getting the audience to care.

YIELD TO THE NIGHT is a watchable little British film noir with a depressing storyline. If you ever wondered whether blonde bombshell Diana Dors could really act, then look no further than here: she gives a very convincing turn as a down-on-her-luck woman who ruthless murders a rival in the opening sequence. The rest of the narrative takes place in real-time as Dors counts down the days to her impending death in prison, interspersed with flashbacks showing how she got into the mess in the first place. Truth be told, I found this all a bit depressing and lifeless (no pun intended),although J. Lee Thompson's direction is good - it's odd to think he ended up shooting Hollywood action pictures with Charles Bronson some 30 years later. The strong supporting cast includes Geoffrey Keen, a great Michael Ripper, and a loathsome Michael Craig.