J Lee Thompson is a British director who could maybe do with a bit more auteur respect: here is a double-bill rerelease of two of his early black-and-white films from the 1950s. The Weak and the Wicked (★★★★☆) is a melodrama that came out in 1954 just before his wrenching classic Yield to the Night, which featured Diana Dors on death row. It is a tough women’s prison film as well, one that quickly morphs into a social-issue sermon; it is richly flavoured, speckled with comic interludes and gloriously cast with Glynis Johns as Jean, a young society beauty and gambling addict whose dud cheque leads to an appearance in court and whose head-girl demeanour never falters in the clink. She becomes a good pal inside to brassy blond Betty Brown, played by Dors.
The movie is adapted by dramatist Anne Burnaby from the sensational autobiographical novel by the real-life upper class ex-con Joan Henry who also wrote the original source material for Yield to the Night. Henry married Thompson, helped him quit drinking and stayed with him through subsequent movies including Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone, until they divorced. (Startlingly, Burnaby was herself imprisoned in 1960 for stabbing a man with whom she had reportedly become obsessively infatuated.) Like the book, The Weak and the Wicked fudges the issue of Jean’s guilt by claiming that while she did bounce a cheque in a gambling club, the insurance fraud that got her arrested was an elaborate frame-up masterminded by the vengeful casino manager. It delivers the time-honoured frisson of the women’s prison film: hatchet-faced wardresses telling the new inmates to “strip”, with the scene subsequently held just long enough to let the audience think they are actually going to see something.
