A bag filled with money is a classic object and inciting incident in film noir, never an opportunity but a source of fatalistic consequences. So it goes in Too Late For Tears (1949) when a married couple (Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy) are driving down a lonely stretch of road when another car throws in a bag into the backseat of their open top convertible. Peeking inside the bag, and what do you know, it’s filled with money. Hand it over to the police or keep it for ourselves? Let’s sleep on it, honey – famous last words. Then you have a suspicious stranger popping around asking questions (Dan Duryea) when wifey’s home alone. Also in the mix is the husband’s neighbouring sister (Kristine Miller) and one of his old war buddies (Don DeFore). There are twists and turns as befitting a film noir plot, but it’s really about the characters played by Scott and Duryea. They are both archetypes in one sense – an unsuspecting femme fatale and a wiseguy hood – yet the writing and the performances give them shading and personality. I remember seeing the Humphrey Bogart film Dead Reckoning a long time ago and seeing Lizabeth Scott in that; she did feel like a Lauren Bacall replacement, similar smoky voice and hairstyle, cast to have the same type of chemistry while Bacall was on maternity leave or something. In Too Late For Tears, Scott makes quite an impression, giving a great performance where she’s not some stylish ice cold vamp, her scheming seems strained by anxiety and nerves; her need for money is a pathological desire that even shocks a sleazy hood like Duryea. Directed by Byron Haskin and written by Roy Huggins, this is another film that wasn’t a success upon release and was kind of forgotten, but restored and revived by the Film Noir Foundation (they also salvaged the other film noir, A Woman On The Run). Available to stream on Kanopy but also a fair few copies on YouTube (it’s a public domain film). Recommended.
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