3.5 out of 5 stars

Aficionados of women’s prison dramas hoping for lurid exploitation thrills in The Weak and the Wicked will be sorely disappointed. By today’s standards, this is a polite, well-behaved film about polite, well-behaved ladies, which goes out of its way to reassure us that its imprisoned characters are not really “bad”.

Betty (Diana Dors) was only locked up because she lied to protect her boyfriend; the offence of Tina (Simone Silva) is implied to have been a crime of passion; Millie (Athene Seyler)—who on the face of it is a cold-blooded murderer for profit–is presented as a dotty old lady straight out of an Ealing comedy. Even Babs (Jane Hylton), who you might expect the film to censure for neglecting her children, has largely been led astray by a man.

Indeed, despite the title, there is virtually no wickedness on display (and the nudge-wink title of the considerably shorter US version, Young and Willing, is even more misleading). The film reflects instead the view of Joan Henry—author of the autobiographical source novel—when she wrote that “the majority of women in prison are weak characters who have become victims of circumstance”.

But even so, although it could hardly be described as radical or groundbreaking and might even strike a viewer today as rather tame, The Weak and the Wicked would have seemed a much bigger step in the direction of social realism for its British audience in 1954. Women’s prison dramas were uncommon at the time (1950’s Caged was a rare example, and 1955’s Women’s Prison would follow soon after this one, but both were American), there was concern about a perceived postwar rise in youth crime (represented in the film by the characters of Dors and Rachel Roberts), and women’s jails themselves had been in the news with the 1947 establishment of the first open prison for female inmates.

The Weak and the Wicked certainly may seem dated today, too. Class distinctions permeate the film, even though they’re not its subject; each character’s precise position in society is made obvious the moment they are introduced. It is essentially in favour of the prison system, although it doesn’t entirely pull back from illustrating some specific cruelties within the system, and it advocates that inmates accept their lot (“there are no different prisoners”, says Glynis Johns’s protagonist Jean, “only those who are bright enough to know when they are beaten”).

And, of course, men are thematically very much present although the majority of the narrative is all-female. Even the women’s prison is a man’s world. They’re not always a good influence, but they are powerful forces in the female characters’ lives; sometimes they are at least partly culpable in the crimes for which these women have been put away, and even when they’re not, there is a man involved somewhere. Indeed, the trailer goes so far as to suggest that Jean might not have been sent to prison “if she’d listened to Michael”, while the poster breathlessly promised a tale of “women… barred from men!”, again hinting at undelivered steaminess.

Henry’s novel, published in 1952, had created a sensation and though elements were toned down for the film, much of The Weak and the Wicked draws on Henry’s experiences as a prisoner. The character Jean, like the author, receives her jail sentence for fraud connected to her gambling habit (but again, as with other characters, this is presented in a way that makes it very clear she’s weak rather than wicked). Holloway Prison in London, where Henry began to serve her time, becomes Blackdown Prison; Askham Grange in North Yorkshire, the open prison where Henry was later sent and which was the first of its kind, is even more thinly disguised as The Grange.

The movie starts with the guilty verdict against Jean and her sentence. She soon meets Dors’s Betty (who will be a companion throughout the movie) as well as a succession of other inmates, and their individual back stories form a large part of the film, showing the different routes by which women—ranging from the deliberately criminal to the simply neglectful—end up in jail. Apart from one sequence near the end where it’s briefly believed that a character has escaped, there’s rather little plot in the conventional sense within the prisons, and life there is reduced to a series of vignettes.

At a few points, the film does powerfully illustrate the emotional effect of incarceration, most notably in a brief but still distressing scene where a woman prisoner’s baby is taken from her for adoption. At many others, though, it resorts to broad comedy, and even within an anthology format, the different moods sit very uncomfortably together. This is a fundamental problem with The Weak and the Wicked which many contemporary critics noted, though it doesn’t prove fatal.

Nothing about the tragedy or the humour is particularly complicated, nor is the filmmaking. J. Lee Thompson’s direction is straightforward and unflashy, relying on the content of images (for example, the then cinematically unfamiliar sight of women exercising together in a prison yard) to be striking enough in itself. He would go on to make much better-remembered films like Ice Cold in Alex (1958), The Guns of Navarone (1962), and the original Cape Fear (1962), but this—his third feature—was his first significant success, so it’s perhaps fitting that he also married the novelist Henry.

Like his direction, the screenplay by Anne Burnaby, along with Thompson and Henry, is consistently plain, dispensing with small talk and making little attempt to create atmosphere or personalities, instead concentrating purely on getting the necessary points across. This, as well as the heavy reliance on flashback and voiceover, can give the film a somewhat forced feeling at times—one is very aware, watching The Weak and the Wicked, of its structure and objectives—though on the plus side, the writing does move the storylines along efficiently.

Leighton Lucas’s score is notable mostly for its clichés (and one has to wonder how much care he put into it; the ominous music when Jean arrives at The Grange, for example, is completely inappropriate for a moment where both her prison career and the film as a whole become much more positive and carefree). Much of the acting, however, is surprisingly effective for a film where the characters mostly exist to represent types and illustrate situations; they have little depth or complexity because the film’s purpose doesn’t require it.

Johns’s Jean is on the saintly side, and her comments on how rough she looks in prison are at odds with her perfectly groomed style, but she’s not too obviously an actress pretending to be a woman with problems; a touch of vulnerability in John’s performance does much to make her human. Dors, who would soon play another sympathetic woman prisoner for Thompson in Yield to the Night (1956), brings a touching combination of innocence and cynicism to her role here. However, for audiences at the time, it was probably the young film star’s 1953 conviction for theft that made her so right for the part. (Oddly enough, the co-writer Anne Burnaby also pleaded guilty to a violent crime a few years later; both were doubtless weak rather than wicked.)

Rachel Roberts stands out as Pat, a working-class inmate who is aggressive and implicitly foul-mouthed (though of course, the film doesn’t let us hear any of that) but inevitably has a heart of gold. Seyler as the elderly Millie and Sybil Thorndike as her partner in crime Mabel is amusing in a Miss Marpleish way, and in another of the more humorous sections Olive Sloane stands out as Nellie, a professional shoplifter.

Her husband is played by Sid James (here billed as Sidney) and Anthony Newley makes a tiny, uncredited appearance, but John Gregson disappoints with his woodenness in the main male role, as Jean’s boyfriend. The prison warders are barely characters at all—mostly scowling harridans at the first prison, smiling non-entities at the second—though Jean Taylor Smith is convincing as the governor of The Grange.

Like many social-issue dramas of the period, The Weak and the Wicked is much more interested in sending a message than in engaging fully with the lives of its characters, and though it is not overtly very critical of the prison system, its plea for greater understanding and less condemnation of the people who end up in that system does come through loud and clear. Even the comedy sequences, though it would certainly be a more hard-hitting film without them, don’t detract from this too much.

Today, of course, it’s more a historical document than a commentary on current affairs, and as such it will be particularly appealing to people interested in the period itself. But it also manages, almost despite itself and thanks largely to the performances, to offer some truly memorable characters who bring alive what could otherwise risk being dull and preachy. If it’s not as wicked as the publicity promised, it’s certainly not weak either.

UK | 1954 | 88 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

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Blu-ray Special Features:

  • New 4K restoration of the film. A very clean, rich transfer; you only have to compare it with the trailer to see the difference the restoration makes.
  • From Entrapment to Freedom. This new discussion between the film writers Matthew Sweet and Phuong Le provides a good overview of Thompson’s movie, its themes and its context. Sweet, interestingly, defends the humorous sections in the film which most critics have found jarring.
  • From Book to Film. Melanie Williams from the University of East Anglia specialises in British film and gender but this is the lesser of the two main extras (also new), in fact focusing much more on the movie than on Joan Henry’s book.
  • Behind-the-scenes stills gallery. A small collection, most of them featuring Diana Dors.
  • Trailer.
  • English subtitles.
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Cast & Crew

director: J. Lee Thompson.
writers: J. Lee Thompson, Anne Burnaby & Joan Henry (based on the novel ‘Who Lie in Gaol’ by Joan Henry).
starring: Glynis Johns, Diana Dors, John Gregson, Olive Sloane, Rachel Roberts, Jane Hylton, Athene Seyler, Cecil Trouncer, Ursula Howells & Edin Styles.