| Too Late for Tears | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Byron Haskin |
| Produced by | Hunt Stromberg |
| Written by | Roy Huggins |
| Starring | Lizabeth Scott Don DeFore Dan Duryea Arthur Kennedy |
| Music by | R. Dale Butts |
| Cinematography | William C. Mellor |
| Editing by | Harry Keller |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | August 13, 1949 (United States) |
| Running time | 99 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Too Late for Tears is a 1949 black-and-white film noir directed by Byron Haskin and starring Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea. The screenplay was written by Roy Huggins, drawn from a serial he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. The film was reissued as Killer Bait in 1955. Too Late for Tears has been in the public domain for years but there are sundry edits and running times.[1]
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Alan and Jane Palmer (Kennedy and Scott) are driving to a party in the Hollywood Hills one evening when someone in another car throws a suitcase stuffed with cash into the back seat of their convertible. They are chased by yet another car for a short time but get away. Back at their (quite respectable) Hollywood apartment they find $60,000 inside the suitcase. Jane wants to keep the money, but Alan wants to take it to the police and stashes the cash in a locker at Union Station, hoping he can sway her into willingly giving the money to the police. A few days later while Alan is at work Danny (Duryea) shows up at their apartment, tells Jane he is a detective and quickly learns she has the money and has already begun spending it. Her husband Alan likewise becomes upset when he finds she has been running up bills, clearly planning to spend their new-found, ill-gotten wealth. With her heart steadfastly set on keeping the money, she makes a deal with Danny to split the money. Hoping to kill him, she lures Danny up into the hills but he doesn't trust her and flees. She later asks a now wary Danny to meet her in the evening at Westlake Park near downtown Los Angeles, where she and her husband Alan take a romantic boat ride. Jane has planned to kill her husband Alan in the boat but is stopped by a pang of guilt and begs him to take her to shore, then blurts out that she wants to send the claim check for the locker to the police. Unaware of why his wife is upset, Alan wants to carry on with the boat ride. Hoping to find cigarettes, he picks up her bag and his own gun falls out. The startled look on his face tells Jane he knows straight off what she had in mind, she fearfully grabs the gun, they struggle and she shoots, killing him. When Danny sees the body he doesn't like the notion of being tangled up in a murder, but Jane threatens to tell the police he killed her husband unless he helps her. As she planned earlier, after dumping the body in the lake they leave the park together so as to mislead witnesses into thinking she left with her husband, whom she later reports as missing.
Don Blake (DeFore) claims to be an old army buddy of Alan's and in Los Angeles by happenstance. Whilst looking into what happened to Alan, Don falls in love with Alan's younger sister Kathy, who lives in the same apartment building and has growing worries about Jane. Jane finds out that Don never knew Alan and hits him over the head with a pistol. Having gotten the cash out of the locker at Union Station, she meets a wholly drunken Danny at his apartment and says she needs him to help her run away. Danny tells Jane he knows he still can't trust her, but that he has fallen in love with her and that money was a "once in a lifetime" blackmail payoff from an insurance scam. She kills him with a poisoned drink. After finding Danny's body, the Los Angeles police tell Don that if he wants them to drain the small lake at Westlake Park in search of Jane's missing husband, he must pay thousands of dollars. Meanwhile Jane flees with all the money to Mexico City, where Don finds her living in a lavish, streamline moderne hotel penthouse. Thinking he is either after the money or with the police, Jane pleads with him to take half. Don tells her he is the brother of Jane's earlier, first husband Bob Blanchard and that he now understands how she could have driven him into killing himself. As Mexican police detectives rush into the room she quickly backs away in tears onto a balcony, then screams as she falls over the railing to her death.
Both Scott and Duryea appeared in many films noir during this era, however they did but one other film together, the western Silver Lode (1954).
When the film was released The New York Times wrote positively of the film, writing, "If proof be needed at this point that money is the root of all evil—a theme, incidentally, which has been the root of more than one motion picture—then Too Late for Tears, which came to the Mayfair on Saturday, is proof positive. For producer Hunt Stromberg, director Byron Haskin and scenarist Roy Huggins, who adapted his own Saturday Evening Post serial, herein have fashioned an effective melodramatic elaboration of that theme. Despite an involved plot and an occasional overabundance of palaver, not all of which is bright, this yarn about a cash-hungry dame who doesn't let men or conscience stand in her way, is an adult and generally suspenseful adventure."[2]
Most recently, film critic Dennis Schwartz also wrote a favorable review, writing, "Byron Haskin's low-budget film noir makes good use of its Los Angeles locale and its lady bluebeard is fun to watch as she does her nasty gun thing with her nice guy hubby and rotten poison thing with her boyfriend (she took care of her first hubby off camera, so we're not sure how he got it!)...Though a minor film noir, it relates to the ambitions the middle-class had during the postwar period to better their life materially and socially. Jane's drive for wealth was so extreme that she will not stop at murder to rise above her impoverished middle-class circumstances, and her warped character is used to show how money can't buy one happiness. The husky-voiced winsome smiling Lizabeth Scott turns in a finely tuned performance as the femme fatale; while Dan Duryea is in his element as the alcoholic weak-kneed cad, who shows he doesn't have as much stomach for his criminal mischief as does his lady accomplice."[3]
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