SPOILER ALERT!!!

These reviews will often discuss what happens in the movies involved, so please, please, if you haven’t seen one of these movies yet, do not read the review if you want to watch the film first.

Too Late for Tears

This minor film noir is an unusual example of the genre in two ways. It is set in the suburbs rather than the city, and the main instigator of the action is a woman. Suburbia doesn’t feature much in film noir, and when it does it is usually part of the stifling domesticity that the male lead seeks to escape from (e.g. DOA, Pitfall). Likewise, the femme fatale may often be the reason for twists and turns in the noir plot but she herself is rarely the instigator of the action. A brief synopsis of the plot – greedy housewife (Jane, played by Lizabeth Scott) kills her weak husband, Alan, in order to keep a suitcase of hot money that (literally) lands in the back of their car, and then later tries to poison her husband’s sister and murders the blackmailer for whom the money was originally intended – may suggest the well-worn trope of the icy-hearted femme fatale. Yet Jane is too run-of-the-mill and narrow and lower-middle-class to achieve the level of evil of a Phyllis Dietrichson or a Kathy Moffett.

This is because Jane’s behaviour – however venal – can be explained in one-dimensional terms that the other women’s cannot. Jane is motivated by one thing only – money – but money purely as a way of gaining social status. Too Late for Tears is less a movie about inexplicable evil than the destructive effects of obsession with social class in post-war American suburbia. In the opening scene, we see Jane and Alan on their way to a dinner party which Jane doesn’t want to attend. She explains that she hates being ‘patronised’ by the ‘diamond-studded wife’ who will be hosting the party. Later, when trying to persuade Alan to keep the money that falls into their lap, she talks about the humiliation of growing up poor. However, she admits that her family were ‘not hungry poor’, but ‘middle-class poor’. Therefore, while Jane’s desperate need for wealth may arguably include a pathological dimension, it cannot be called psychologically unmotivated or said to result from any sort of existential evil. As she herself recognises, she has the values of the ‘kind of people who can’t keep up with the Joneses’, and this conformity and need for social approval is her key characteristic. To use a dated label, Jane is irredeemably petit-bourgeois.

So Jane is greedy and opportunistic and resourceful under threat rather than the stereotyped noir spiderwoman spinning her well-planned web. This is made clear very early in the movie when a cop pulls up the car while the suitcase full of money is on the back seat, and Jane quickly fabricates the lie that she and Alan are eloping in order to stop the cop investigating further. As her desperation to keep the money grows stronger, the film depicts a clear progression to her moral decline. She plans to kill Alan but then changes her mind, before the gun goes off by accident. Once steeped in blood, though, she finds it progressively easier to go further, attempting to murder Alan’s sister and poisoning the petty criminal, Danny. Each time she is in peril she reacts with a mix of confused desperation and quick cunning. After killing Alan, for instance, she sets up an imaginary scenario in which Alan goes missing after going out to buy some whisky and invents an other woman to satisfy the cop who investigates his disappearance. Yet her improvised stories nearly always have holes (for example, Alan’s sister knows that they already had whisky in the apartment) and Jane never has the icy composure and emotional detachment of the classic femme fatale.

Nearly all of the interest in this movie resides in the changing relationship between Jane and Danny (Dan Duryea), a small-time crook and blackmailer who turns up in search of the suitcase of money. A fascinating role reversal unfolds as the suburban housewife grows in power and resourcefulness when the action turns to murder, while the small-time crook shrivels once he strays beyond his customary practice of blackmail and extortion. As Jane grows into her murderous persona, Danny starts to realise that he has bitten off more than he can chew. In his first entrance, he toys with Jane, dominating her throughout. He teases her sexually with ‘Housewives can get awfully bored sometimes’, and even slaps her before threatening her about what will happen if she does not produce the money. Not long after, though, the tables are turned and it is Jane who threatens to shoot Danny and tell the police that he killed her husband, eliciting the grudging compliment, ‘You’re quite a gal, Mrs Palmer.’ As the movie develops, he calls her by a host of different names which reflect his growing awareness that she is not the naive, helpless housewife he had first imagined. At one point he even says, ‘I think some day you probably are going to kill me.’ Just before she does actually kill him, he says, ‘Don’t ever change, tiger. I don’t think I’d like you with a heart.’ By the end, addled with booze, his only wish seems to be to escape from her. Danny, like many men in film noir, is not as tough as he imagines, although a crook of his experience should easily be able to see off a talented amateur like Jane. But Danny is essentially an amateur, too. This is a film without the ruthless, effective killing machines of many other films noirs.

The main weakness of the film lies in its depiction of the supporting characters, who are bland and unconvincing. Even in a genre which is full of weak and vacillating men, Alan comes across as particularly spineless. He makes half-hearted attempts to persuade his wife that they should turn the money over to the cops, but there is no conviction to his arguments. Nor, unlike many other films noirs, is there any kind of sexual chemistry between the couple that might explain Alan’s weakness; although Jane turns on the charm to get what she wants, it takes little effort to persuade him. If Jane displays the small-minded greed of the petit bourgeoisie, Alan epitomises their vacuous morality. At one point he offers the platitude that ‘the only thing worth having is peace of mind’, but like everything he says this seems a conventional piety rather than a heartfelt conviction, and twenty seconds later he is agreeing to keep the money for a little while longer. Meanwhile, his sister feels like little more than a plot device, as does Blake (the brother of Jane’s first husband, who had also died under rather suspicious circumstances), who turns up and plays detective in an attempt to avenge his brother’s death. However, the part is underwritten and underplayed, so we never get much feeling of passion or intelligence lurking beneath the false persona he dons in order to trap Jane. Nor is there any fizz to the romance that develops between Blake and Alan’s sister. Their wholesome relationship provides a contrast to the indifference and lack of understanding between Alan and Jane, or the self-interested suspicion at the heart of the alliance between Jane and Danny, but the romance feels clichéd and convenient, a sop to both the audience and the Production Code, which can offer up the required happy ending in the final moments of the movie.

Having successfully got over the border to Mexico, Jane is finally seen in a luxury suite in a swanky hotel. A man who is probably a gigolo leaves and there is a knock at the door. We watch as Jane, draped in a glamorous gown, glides over to answer it. Yet even in this moment when she has all the trappings of wealth that she has sought so rapaciously, there is something petit-bourgeois about the way she behaves. She does not move to the door in the casual and unselfconscious way that a real lady of wealth would, but acts in what seems more like a pastiche of a rich woman as imagined by someone who has never had money. Jane is playing the role in costume, trapped in petit-bourgeois thinking to the very end.

The last shot of Jane in the film shows her lying dead on the ground surrounded by banknotes. There is clearly a sense in which this movie is an indictment of materialism, but it would place rather too much meaning in this modest work to argue that it exposes the filthy underbelly of the American suburban dream. There are elements of this critique within the film, but rather than depicting 50s American suburban life as rotten to the core, it takes the weaker political position that this life has no core – it is valueless and empty rather than putrid. This robs the film of the power of the very best noirs, which explore a wickedness that is deep and inexplicable and innate to the human species. With its petit-bourgeois settings and ideology, Too Late for Tears offers us Arendt’s banality of evil rather than its dangerous allure.