Movies: Too Late for Tears
Normally I wouldn't like to use a poster that shows violence against a woman, but in the movie, the guy pays and pays for this act. He goes mad with the memory and the regret that he ever got involved with the woman. She makes him pay for it until she breaks him.
During WWII, Hollywood lost the major part of its European Market, hence the decline and fall of Greta Garbo. But Hollywood came back to Europe with the Allied Victory in WWII, and the French eagerly watched the films from the almost decade that they had missed. Due to the influx of Film refugees (many of them Jewish or with what the Nazis considered to be dubious ethnicities) from Germany and Europe, Hollywood films had changed during the war. Many of the immigrant film makers had come from the German studio, UFA, and had developed a fondness for chiaroscuro lighting there. They brought this technique and mixed it with the fatalism and cynicism of the US after the war to make movies with a very harsh view of human nature that the French called, Film Noir, or black film. These black and white films with their deep and dark lighting and their plots about a character's descent into evil and death and the black hole of the soul through careless acts and overwhelming desires were very popular in the 1940s and 1950s. They also fore-shadowed the demise of the Hollywood Studio system along with the deaths of their flawed heroes and heroines.
Lizabeth Scott was a very prominent Film Noir star of the late 1940s and early 1950s. She usually played the hero's girl in the movies. The girl was an innocent drawn into the violence that the hero, through his own weakness or character flaws, was struggling against. The girl was the remnant of the hero's virtue and was often killed before the hero gave into his baser nature and killed and was killed. Sometimes the girl's innocence brought the hero back to life and to good before his human nature which was weak on integrity could betray him to his death. And sometimes, the girl was a woman who was no better than she should be and who drew the hero even further onto the bad side through her own character flaws and desires.
It is a very rare occasion in any film noir when it is the girl whose overwhelming desires and bad decisions cause her own destruction and fall into the evil abyss. The woman rarely carries the action like a film noir hero does, but in Too Late for Tears, Miss Scott got to be the main character with a hankering for a better life than the perfectly good one that she already had that required poor decisions and bad actions on her part to achieve it.
In Too Late for Tears, Miss Scott plays Jane, a housewife with an ordinary husband and an ordinary life in some apartment building called the Chateau de Something (yeah, I know, French pretensions for the middle class life).
Her husband's sister lives across the hall from the reasonably happy couple and the sister might be a zombie or a vampire or a sleep walker. I say this because her voice is a monotone and her face is immobile, and this is years before the discovery of the zombie effects of botox on the facial muscles.
The sister-in-law is so stiff in body and not just in muscle tone, when she appears everything slows down in the time dimension. Maybe she is a super heroine and her power is boring every one Stiff just like her. There is a moment, that drags out forever, in the movie when the sister-in-law pretends to eat. She might be anorexic, although you would never guess it to look at her. The sister-in-law reaches inside her refrigerator for a glass of a "dark" colored liquid but an outsider rings her doorbell and she goes for a glass of "milk" instead. Although that "milk" could have been bone marrow that produces all the rich components of human blood.
Jane and her boring husband begin the movie by doing boring stuff like drive to a dinner party at his boss's house. Jane can't stand the thought of an evening playing grab ass with the husband's boss underneath the dining table and the card table. The husband is resigned to the boredom of the evening because you get the impression that he has never thought of grab ass with the wife, either his or his boss's. A car drives by them on a winding mountain road, the boss must live in a dark castle on top of the mountain, and the other car's occupant tosses a old timey doctor's bag into the back seat of their open convertible car and drives off.
Jane and hubby stop to investigate the bag and discover that it is full of money. Something suspicious and illegal was going down with the other car and so begins the film noir actions that lead to no good to no one no where down the line.
What to do? The other car turns around and comes back for the money bag, but Jane has other ideas. All that money should not go to waste where ever it was bound. It is Jane's now and she is going to keep it. Jane gets behind the wheel and almost leaves hubby in the road when she floors the gas. Jane would have made pretty good driver, she careens around that mountain road like a randy goat after a goatess in heat. The other car never catches up with Jane and the money bag and the husband groping the back seat for his life.
Of course, after the money bag rescue, hubby wants to give the money to the cops, but Jane uses her grab ass powers to convince him to let her keep it. Only it must be kept in the Baggage Claim at a train station because it might give Jane too many orgasms and notions if hubby let her keep it under their bed.
Hubby goes to work and Jane hits the I Magnum store and the driver of the other car shows up at their apartment wanting his money back. The other car's driver is Dan Dureya who made a specialty of playing the buggy bad guy with symptoms of PTSD in film noir. You just knew that if his character had a 100 round clip in his gun that half the town and most of the stray cats would be dead in the street even before the snarl of madness would start to warp his face.
Jane is enterprising and greedy, she ain't giving up that ill-gotten money to no one no matter how menacing his curled lip is. So through mis-direction and wiles and sex, she gets him to come back another day or the day after she gets the money from the Baggage Claim and gets away with it.
Jane has to get the Checked Baggage Claim ticket from her husband and he proves to be remarkably resilient to her importuning.
Hubby made her kill him.
But the pathway to blood money is always bloody and some guy shows up and romances the sister-in-law who steals the claim check.
All these people keep getting in the way of Jane and her money bag.
But Jane and True Love triumph. Jane and the money are re-united in the end. Jane Claims her Bag of Money!
And they go off for a honeymoon in Mexico.
It is glorious and the best sex that Jane ever had.
But the sister-in-law's boyfriend shows up and he wants the money to improve his own sex life, sis-in-law is just so Stiff, maybe the money will give her some flexibility.
We all knew that the parting of Jane and her money would be tragic, and so it was.
Here is an interview with Miss Scott on her movie career. She still looks good and has good memories of her time on the screen.
Click to viewRecommended.
Screen Caps by Me