Too Late for Tears (1949)
Directed by Byron Haskin
United Artists
With Too Late for Tears, director Byron Haskin continued his postwar run of unremarkable but solidly entertaining B movies.
After I Walk Alone (1948) and Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948), I wasn’t expecting anything special from Too Late for Tears. But I was expecting a well-paced, twisty little thriller, and that’s exactly what I got.
Dependable everyman Arthur Kennedy and icy femme fatale Lizabeth Scott play a married couple, Alan and Jane Palmer. One night on a lonely stretch of road in the Hollywood Hills, a huge sum of money literally falls into their laps. They are both tempted by the possibilities that so much cash offers, but they have different ideas about how to proceed. Alan sees nothing but trouble ahead and thinks they should turn the money over to the police. Jane thinks they’d be fools to give it up so easily.
Jane is a striver who’s not above chipping her manicured fingernails to claw her way to the top. She tells Alan that she was never poor, but something much worse — her family was “white-collar poor, middle-class poor,” and they could never quite keep up with the Joneses. Alan tells her there will always be Joneses with more money and shinier toys. Money isn’t the key to happiness.
Jane disagrees, and the plot of the film is driven by her limitless avarice. Dependable beanpole villain Dan Duryea shows up in the early going as a man named Danny Fuller who’s after the money for his own reasons. He throws his weight around, and attempts to intimidate Jane with harsh words and several slaps to the face.
When she says to him, “What do I call you besides Stupid?” he responds, “Stupid’ll do if you don’t bruise easily. Otherwise you might try Danny.”
But in the great tradition of tough-talking bad guys in film noirs, Danny badly underestimates the craftiness and ruthlessness of the femme fatale in the picture.
Lizabeth Scott appeared in a lot of noirs. She chronically underacted, but it works for movies like Too Late for Tears, which are light on characterization but heavy on plot. In addition to the Palmers and the vicious Danny, there is also Alan’s suspicious sister, Kathy Palmer (Kristine Miller), and the mysterious stranger Don Blake (Don DeFore), who may not be who he claims to be.
Too Late for Tears is not a classic film noir, but it’s a good afternoon time-waster. It premiered in Los Angeles on July 17, 1949, and went into wide release in August. It was re-released in September 1955 under the title Killer Bait. It’s in the public domain, so you can download it from archive.org here: http://archive.org/details/TooLateForTears. You can also watch the film in its entirety on YouTube (link below).
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