The film reunited Dors with filmmaker J. Lee Thompson and novelist Joan Henry, the director and original author (respectively) of the prison drama The Weak and the Wicked (1954). Thompson, who came to directing from writing plays and screenplays, and Henry had become romantically involved during the film and started working together on a follow-up. Henry recalled the origins of the idea in a 1999 interview. "Lee and I were talking one day and he was against capital punishment like me, and he said, 'I've always wanted to write a book or a play about a man in a death cell.' I said, 'Well, I couldn't write about a man, but I might be able to do that about a woman.' So he really gave me the idea, and then I showed him a plan." The novel was published in 1954 and Thompson went about pitching it to the studios. It was a serious project that, for all the sensationalist elements, made an impassioned case against capital punishment and Thompson refused to compromise on his vision. He had little luck until real life made the fictional story timely: Ruth Ellis, a beautiful young blonde nightclub manager and model, shot her abusive lover to death in cold blood and received a death sentence. The parallels were uncanny and the film went into production after her execution, giving the filmmakers the opportunity to play up those parallels to Ellis' story. (The story of Ruth Ellis was later dramatized in the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger.)
The role of Mary was developed with Dors in mind and she jumped at the chance. "After ten years of vamping, I have got what I originally wanted to do - a really strong, dramatic role," she told "Photoplay" in 1956. Thompson and Dors were both under contract to Rank and Thompson was determined to cast Dors in the lead, finally taking the project to an independent studio when Rank balked at their sex bomb playing an unrepentant killer.
Thompson opens the film on the murder scene, which he shoots in a series of fractured images and extreme angles, and sets the credits to a brassy, swanky score that suggests lurid subject matter to come, but he contrasts the film noir imagery and attitude of the flashbacks to Mary's life with the much more sedate, introspective scenes in the prison as Mary awaits the result of her appeal. It was a real showcase for Dors, a break from the string of sassy temptresses and dumb blondes to play both a shop girl in a passionate affair and a deadened, resigned woman on death row, and she put everything into the role. The studio used sexy pin-up images of Dors to publicize the picture and played up the lurid elements of the film but there is no glamor to the prison scenes, which she plays in drab prison outfits and no makeup. The studio publicist even brought journalists in to observe Dors shooting the climactic prison scenes. "A lot of stars wouldn't do it but with Dors it's different," observed Thompson. "I think she is, if anything, different with an audience. She likes to have a reaction to the performance."
Yield to the Night finished production before Christmas 1955 and made its world premiere in 1956 at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival (the only British film entered in the festival), where she received a standing ovation. Critics praised the film for its sober approach to the subject. Thompson's direction was singled out (John Dyer wrote that Thompson revealed "a fine sense of style, resourceful and very rarely mannered" in Films and Filming) and Dors received the best notices of her career to date. She was very proud of both the picture and her performance. "I didn't have to work for my looks and my figure," she explained in a 1956 interview with Picturegoer. "I inherited them. And I get no kick at all being told that I'm gorgeous. But tell me I'm an actress and you'll make my day." She was at the top of her career, the second highest-paid actress in England (behind Vivien Leigh), and constantly on magazine covers. But the film was not popular with audiences and it did not lead to better roles for Dors, at least not until the 1960s as she aged out of her sex-bomb image.
Meanwhile Yield to the Night became part of the debate over capital punishment and the film was screened for members of parliament as they debated a bill to abolish the death penalty, which was eventually passed in 1965. Ruth Ellis was the last woman ever executed in England and Thompson remarked that "I like to think that it had some small part in removing the death penalty."
