“I know about that door at the foot of my bed, and it’s through there it happens, isn’t it?” In the opening sequence of J. Lee Thompson’s Yield to the Night (US: Blonde Sinner), we follow Mary Hilton’s (Diana Dors) determined gait as she walks across the city — through the pigeons in the park, past fountains, down a residential street — until she encounters her target, a middle-aged woman, and pumps her full of lead. For the rest of the film, we’re with Mary in her Death Row cell as she recounts the events leading up to her crime and waits helplessly for the end of her life (“through that door”). Don’t expect the action and intrigue of the standard noir, but somehow the suspense is even greater, thanks in large part to Thompson’s gripping direction. We know Hilton’s fate from the start (a governor’s pardon is not presented as a viable possibility) but the process of getting there, particularly the final 20 minutes, the countdown of remaining moments, is narrated with tremendous intensity (“If you accept your punishment – and don’t fight it – you’ll find it much easier to bear”), her multilayered relationships with the prison matrons (Marjorie Rhodes, Molly Urquhart, Mary Mackenzie and especially Yvonne Mitchell) a beautiful way to deliver pathos. Michael Craig appears in the flashback episodes as Jim Lancaster, the man who didn’t deserve the love Mary showered on him (“You do really love me, don’t you?” she asks him repeatedly) and whose own rejection by another woman ends up snuffing out two lives (the suicide discovery scene is a highlight). The unavoidable theme of Christian faith and redemption in the wake of death is handled with deft subtlety: before the guards pray with her, one answers “I couldn’t live without it” when Mary asks if she’s religious, to which Mary responds, “I wish I could believe like that.” Long seen as merely a blonde bombshell, Dors’ moving performance here forced the industry to re-assess her talent and most certainly enhanced her legacy, despite American distributors misleadingly re-naming the film to appeal to the more prurient.