Too Late for Tears (1949)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Absolutely the worst movie.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Lizabeth Scott keeps you stuck on her throughout this film no matter what she is doing. What would you yourself do if a passing car suddenly passes a bag full of money into yours and vanishes? In this case Lizabeth Scott is together with her husband Arthur Kennedy, who is a completely decent fellow who immediately wants to give over the money to the police, while Lizabeth wants to keep it. There the trouble starts. It is increased by some bad luck on the way. Things don't always go as you planned. In this case, two strangers turn up, one more unpleasant to her than the other. And what's more, she commits mistakes and cause accidents to happen. Pity for such a beautiful woman. She remains equally fascinating though in every film she made, and they are usually dark noirs with her husky voice filling the atmosphere with ominous threats against everyone's existence. Throughout this film her acting is the consistent focus point of your fascination while the others in comparison don't seem to act at all, except Arthur Kennedy, who is always good and has a special knack for honest straight-forward roles. Her constant change, like a chameleon, from charming grace and smiles to solemn sinister brooding boding no good to anyone, from tears and despair to flippant gaiety, is a play in itself and indeed worth watching - in every film, like "The Racket", "Dark City" and "Dead Reckoning". She is almost like a Garbo of the dark.

Even on a restored Blu-ray this wonderfully plotted and written noir comes out as a bit of a humdrum film with 'B movie' written all over. Not sure why because there are some great lines and plenty of surprises along the way. I guess, apart from the glorious and dramatic opening, it does lack a little action and the parade of guys willing to help or otherwise don't seem to help this catch fire. Lizabeth Scott has been great and should have been so in this but somehow she looks so strained and uncomfortable. Sure, she has plenty happening in the story to make her feel strained and uncomfortable but here the problem seems to be with some issue with her co-stars or possibly the director. Either way this is a good tale that is never obvious, maybe a little far fetched but thats okay, and if we take issue now and again with a character's motives, all is resolved fairly well in the end.

Lizabeth Scott plays a dissatisfied wife in the Hollywood area, up to her neck in bills and jealous of friends living better than she, who sees a satchel of blackmail loot as an easy way out of her turmoil. Honest husband Arthur Kennedy hopes to turn the money in after it was mistakenly tossed in the couple's car, but Scott has other plans (the most immediate of which is the purchase of a new fur jacket!). Based on a magazine story, this hot-headed melodrama manages some interesting bits and pieces but is nearly done in by its ultra low budget. Scott, her taut little face accentuated by dark brows and heavy lipstick, enunciates in a breathy voice throughout, turning the flirtatious charm on and off like a switch. She's a curious femme fatale, but one who seems easily ruffled or tripped up. Dan Duryea (who amusingly resembles Willam H. Macy) is the slovenly dupe who comes looking for the money, while stodgy Don DeFore says he's an old buddy of Kennedy's but has a different angle (which turns out to be quite a stretch, even for a bottom-drawer thriller!). The Los Angeles milieu is fascinating, as are some of Scott's predicaments--though this may be the only noir in history to use a glass of milk as a red herring for murder! Not a bad B-flick, one that moves at a fast clip and doesn't sentimentalize its characters. **1/2 from ****

Though listed here at IMDb as "Too Late for Tears," the version I saw went by the much better title, "Killer Bait." Whatever you want to call it, this is low-budget film noir at its best. Lizabeth Scott plays one of the most fatale femmes in noir history, a housewife whose desire to keep up with the Joneses turns her into a mercenary murderer. Through the kind of chance accident that so often kicks off the plots of films noir, she and her husband (Arthur Kennedy) become custodians of $60K that was going to be used to pay off a blackmailer. Not surprisingly, the blackmailer comes calling to collect, and he's not surprisingly played by Dan Duryea, who played sardonic unctuousness better than anyone. He thinks he can bully these inexperienced nobodies into giving him the money back, but he has no idea what he's in for with this no longer very demure housewife. Indeed, the film almost makes a joke out of how scared Duryea becomes of her, feeling the need to have a gun on him any time he's going to meet up with her."Killer Bait" is an example of why I love noir. These films were cheap and obscure. They weren't made to be big money makers and there wasn't as much need to make them crowd pleasing. For that reason, they're more honest than the big studio products of the time, cynical about American life in a way that other movies at the time weren't allowed to be. In this film, that pressure to conform to "normal" middle class existence in the post-war years, and the need to define one's success relative to others in materialistic terms, is enough to make one kill. Lizabeth Scott's character is American capitalist society taken to nightmarish extremes.Directed by special effects wizard Byron Haskin, who proves that he's as at home in the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles as he is on the surface of Mars.Grade: A