Outside Waterloo Station one night Roy miraculously returns (from prison camp), but although he still loves her and takes her to meet his aristocratic family in Scotland, Myra realises she cannot marry him, obeying the Production Code’s law that A Fallen Woman Cannot Rise Again.
It [the film] manages to evoke that sense of time suspended in wartime (‘No one who has been in this war is young’ says Roy) and a period when women with no income or prospects become caught between the pressures of survival and the social values which damn their conduct.
“The empty space, the unsaid, anticipates her death. For prostitution is absolutely irrecuperable. Roy can cross class demarcations to marry her but once she slips into prostitution she is lost… she is, literally, unpresentable and must die.”
Dark Star: A Biography of Vivien Leigh by Alan Strachan.