Among scads of film-noir productions, what makes Byron Haskin’s TOO LATE FOR TEARS stands out is its portrayal of an unrivaled femme fatale in the form of Lizabeth Scott’s Jane Palmer, who should stand side by side with and look daggers at Gene Tierney’s chilling turn as the murderous socialite Ellen Berent in John M. Stahl’s Technicolor noir LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945), both amoral, Janus-faced, self-centered, cold-hearted to the core and as cool as a cucumber in face of adversity, no heinous act is above them in their single-minded pursuance.
In TOO LATE FOR TEARS, what Jane covets is money, an implausible windfall thrown right in the back seat of their convertible when Jane and her hubby Alan (Kennedy, a painfully sympathetic Mr. Nice Guy) are on their way to a party. Against his best judgement, Alan agrees to Jane’s supervening proposition regarding the $60,000 cash and from her very first instinct, Jane betrays that she will never let go of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure a new life in the lap of luxury (with or without Alan), and Alan is too amenable in nature and too close to see through Jane’s grasping avarice, he doesn’t have any chance to have his way and is shockingly and conveniently left out of the picture.
Neither does Danny Fuller (Duryea), the supposed recipient of the ill-gotten lucre, a ruffian who can grossly smacks Jane in their first round of gamesmanship, but soon Jane gets the better of his browbeating braggadocio and licentious disposition, and turns him as another biddable accomplice, in spite of knowing all too well of Jane’s fly-by-night empty-promises and none-too-subtle wiles, Danny’s tragedy is that he is totally drawn to that kind of dame, and Duryea’s solid performance registers a weird hybridization of deep-dish misogyny and fateful concupiscent attraction, which makes Danny a very useful disposable asset foolishly yet involuntarily dancing to Jane’s murderous tunes.
At any rate, Jane will meet her nemesis, Don Blake (DeFore), who claims to be Alan’s old army buddy, but hides his real identity. Apart from trying to get the bottom of Alan’s unusual disappearance, he also gets smitten with Alan’s comely sister Kathy (Miller, trying her very best to compensate Jane’s outright connivance with umpteen positiveness, ultimately, what a characterless good girl she is). Narrowly spared his life under Jane’s pistol, Don will cunningly/cruelly let Jane have a taste of living the life of Riley before divulging his arrière-pensée and occasioning her undoing, again, revenge is a dish better served cold.
A competently shot independent B-movie, whose budget restraint begins to tell when the camera keeps lingering in its anonymously studio-built apartments where most of the goings-on takes place, and Roy Huggins’ quixotic screenplay indulges in oceanic artistic license to pull off all Jane’s crazy schemes and the logical threads (although a shoutout to the red herring of Kathy’s glass of milk, naughtily misleads us to some illusory dreadful thought), but owing to a terrific Lizabeth Scott, who holds fast to Jane’s mad-keen monomania with sterling nicety, moxie and a delectable aroma of mystique, TOO LATE FOR TEARS is not buried in oblivion. We know her misdeeds will eventually go south in one way or another, still, for what it is worth, Jane is a stouthearted anti-heroine that dares to flout all the established hurdles to go for broke, she fails and falls, but what a splendid failure and a fantastic fall!
referential entries: Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY (1955, 6.2/10); John M. Stahl’s LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945, 7.7/10).
