Too Late for Tears (1949)

Film: Too Late for Tears (1949)
Stars: Lizabeth Scott, Don DeFore, Dan Duryea, Arthur Kennedy, Kristine Miller
Director: Byron Haskin
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Lizabeth Scott-click here to learn more about Ms. Scott (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

One of my pet issues is film preservation.  We've done several articles in the past talking about lost films and ways that we should try to preserve cinema for future generations (I'm working on another, similar article right now but I'm not going to promise when it'll be done as it's taking an inordinate amount of research to complete, but I promise it'll be cool when I eventually publish it).  So when I get the opportunity to highlight an organization that is doing some of this terrific work, I'm going to take it.  The Film Noir Foundation basically saved Too Late for Tears by creating a properly cinematic version of the original film, rather than some of the bootlegged public domain copies that came under a variety of different titles.  This is incredibly cool, having an organization devoted to bringing the original, pristine forgotten classics back to film-lovers everywhere, and actually they've done it for another film we've featured in our Saturdays with the Stars series, 1950's Woman on the Run with Ann Sheridan.  Not only are these restorations vital to study these actresses from an historical perspective, they're also important for film fans themselves, because like Sheridan in Woman on the Run, Too Late for Tears gives us by-far the best performance from Lizabeth Scott we have had throughout our look at her career in June.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around Jane (Scott) and Alan (Kennedy) Palmer, a seemingly normal couple on their way to a dinner party Jane is resistant to attend.  While swerving during a fight on the road, a car drives by carrying a brief case full of money, and throws it into the backseat of the Palmers' convertible.  This strange case of fortune causes a quick change in Jane, who sees this as a way for her to get the life she always dreamed of (we learn there's about $60k in the suitcase, which is just over $600k in modern money, so we're talking about a "change our lives forever" sort of situation here).  Alan, though, wants to go to the police, and to make things more confusing, a man (the man whose money it was supposed to be) named Danny (Duryea) shows up, and demands the money from Jane.  We get a second mysterious man soon after who claims to be an old army buddy of Alan's named Don (DeFore), who shows up just after Alan "goes missing" (but we know that Jane accidentally shot him on a boat, and buried him at the bottom of the lake since it's certain that she & Danny would be blamed for the death).

The film continues to unfurl at a breakneck speed.  As we've seen in our profiles not only of the films of Ms. Scott this month, but also our film noir classics, the genre is good at throwing out loads of plot, frequently to distract the viewer from occasionally questionable acting decisions & thin budgets.  This isn't needed in Too Late for Tears, though, as it's very watchable and doesn't have a weak link in the cast list.  I loved the many clever choices with the plot, frequently throwing out twist-after-twist-after-twist which all make sense (Don being the former brother-in-law to Jane through her first husband probably felt a little bit much that late in the picture, but it was a good explanation as to why he so instantly hated her).  The biggest thing holding back the movie may have been the Hays Code-considering how much she sacrificed to get there, Jane almost certainly would have gotten to keep the money in a neo-noir, rather than plummeting to her death, a clenched fist of bloody bills her bon voyage (because it's also the 1940's, we get to see Scott looking radiant even though she just collapsed onto cement from a penthouse window).

Scott has never been better (and I've seen all of our films for her this month, so while I liked next week's movie, she's nowhere near as good as this).  This is almost certainly what Hal Wallis saw she was capable of when he forced her into stardom, and probably why select pockets of Film Twitter have been obsessed with her in the years since.  Her Jane is craven, beautiful, dangerous, and somehow still girlish.  This has been called one of the "quintessential" femme fatales, and it works best because Scott is so hard-to-read until the last moments of the film.  You can't quite tell how often she's just shocked that she's this evil or whether she just keeps getting pulled down further through a combination of greed and bad luck.  Either way, it's a marvelous performance, ruthless & unique; Joan Crawford was the original choice to play this part, but while Crawford is the superior actress of the two, it's impossible to think of her improving upon Scott's Jane Palmer, and in fact her hardened edge would have stolen some of the twists that would eventually come from the character.  Whereas other femme fatales need to make their characters' folly be love of a man or "imperfection in the eyes of her lover" sealing her doom, Scott's Jane Palmer is brought down simply by greed, a lust for what's just out-of-reach.