Women of Twilight
Number 4 Albion Road, North West London, the boarding house of widow Helen Allistair, one of the few landladies who is willing to rent rooms to lone mothers and their children, either unmarried or separated from their husbands, the latest arrival Vivianne Bruce, pregnant by nightclub singer Jerry Nolan who murdered his benefactor, she evicted from her upmarket flat for her association with the scandal and with nowhere else to go.
Accustomed to a better class of life, Vivianne doesn’t mix with the other women whom she finds common and finds it difficult to adjust, the open hostility of charwoman Jess making her particularly unwelcome, but reluctantly forced to share a room with Christine who hopes to marry the father of her son when he returns from America the two displaced women become friends bound together by trying and sometimes traumatic times.
Based on Sylvia Rayman’s 1951 stage play of the same name, Women of Twilight was swiftly optioned for film, premiered in November 1952 directed by Innocents in Paris’ Gordon Parry with Rene Ray, Vida Hope and Betty Henderson reprising their theatrical roles of Vivianne, Jess and the nurse alongside The Haunting’s Lois Maxwell as Christine, Joan Dowling in her final role before her suicide as the cheerful but flighty Rosie and West 11’s Freda Jackson as the formidable Mrs Allistair.
The women condemned alongside their children, Mrs Allistair likes to keep a clean and harmonious house but her aloofness punctuated by occasional warmth when she needs cooperation is the mask worn by a monster, preying on those who have nowhere else to go, fleecing them for every penny and threatening them when they try to break free of her control, tragic Sally (Dorothy Gordon) already broken by her cruelty, a friendless ghost either mocked or taunted by the other women.
Laurence Harvey’s Jerry only referred to in the stage version, Anatole de Grunwald’s adaptation has created some odd transitions, Vivianne’s grief at the execution of Jerry which presumably placed to conclude the first act allowing the audience time to reflect and gather themselves in the interval rather than immediately moving to the jaunty music which accompanies the arrival of a telegram for Christine several weeks later, but now able to wear “the first British film to receive an “X” certificate as a badge of honour the overall power of the piece is undiminished.
A tragic portrait of women ostracised by society with no support or recourse astonishingly set within living memory, when capital punishment still existed in Britain, the Women of Twilight have found a new home as part of StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics range, supported by two interviews with film historians Melanie Williams and Marc David Jacobs discussing the film, the issues raised within it and the time which gave rise to them.
