Technically my first review of 2016 belongs to the last movie of 2015, because this really was the kind of year a person sees out with film noir. I watched it on New Year's Eve, partly because I had missed it this summer when the restored version screened for the first time on TCM. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants, I've found our third housewife noir, or whatever we want to call the genre formerly theorized from the existence of Black Angel (1946) and The Reckless Moment (1949). It's called Too Late for Tears (1949), it stars Lizabeth Scott, and it's a doozy. Right up until the inevitable moral payback, it's rather like the origin story of a femme fatale.
Meet Jane Palmer, played by Scott in what is now considered her career-defining role—TCM ran it in memoriam of her death in January 2015. I'd never seen her before. I should like to see her again. The actress has a look of Lauren Bacall, but harder cut, with prominent cheekbones and a heavy mouth; the character keeps her eyes always a little narrowed, disdainful, difficult to see into. She can put on the persuasion with her husky voice, but it sounds truest when she's issuing flat, cold directives like "People saw me come onto this boat with my husband and they'll see me get off with him" to a man who isn't her husband and is just now beginning to realize where that leaves him, alone at night with a woman who stands no higher than his shoulder and holds a pistol with a lot more steel. He will nickname her "Tiger," hardly joking at all. "I didn't know they made them as beautiful as you are," he marvels, "and as smart—or as hard." But we don't meet her from his perspective, as usually happens with beautiful, deadly women and outclassed men. We open the movie with Jane herself, the night her bland suburban life is sideswiped by the underworld, more or less literally when a stranger in a passing car suddenly hurls a suitcase containing $100,000 in unmarked bills into the back seat of the Palmers' convertible. Very obviously, these are not kosher C-notes. So what would you do if someone else's payoff landed in your lap? For Jane, it's the once-in-a-lifetime windfall that answers all of their prayers, or hers at least. All her life, she's been striving to afford the lifestyle she never had the chance to get accustomed to: "We were white-collar poor, middle-class poor, the kind of people who can't keep up with the Joneses and die a little every day because they can't." For her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy), who's reconciled himself to the fact that "there'll always be Joneses with a little more," the money is nothing but "a blind alley with a big barred gate at the end." He's right, of course, with the title there like cautionary neon from the start, but what's impressive is the run the movie gives Jane first.
As she's only the second instance of an unequivocal femme fatale I've seen in the wild,1 it's difficult for me to gauge whether Jane behaves entirely according to the rules of her archetype, but I found it striking that while she does use her sexuality to get what she needs from men, she also uses—quite effectively—violence. The first killing really looks like an accident, but she doesn't hesitate to turn it to her advantage. The second is no mistake. Two other attempts are averted by the vagaries of the plot, not by the intervention of conscience or feminine weakness. The latter makes an excellent ruse, though, and it almost never fails. Men are always ready to help out or take advantage, or think they're doing one or the other of these things. In this department the film benefits cleverly from its casting of Dan Duryea. His first appearance in Too Late for Tears feels deliberately reminiscent of his star-making entrance in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944). There he was a crooked ex-cop turned blackmailer, searching Joan Bennett's rooms with insouciant creepiness, as if he were frisking her body instead of her liquor cabinet, her perfume table, her dresser drawers; the sense of menace he offers is lazy rather than volatile, a lanky figure in a straw boater and a double-breasted dark suit who talks extortion with such a drawling smile that the careless quickness with which he hits Bennett in the face is actually shocking, snake-strike nasty.2 As Danny Fuller, supposed P.I. in search of the missing cash, he investigates the Palmers' apartment with similarly invasive efficiency; he even offers Jane a few sharp smacks when she disclaims the whereabouts of his "dough." The familiar half-smirk is in place, as is the malicious air of knowing the game and amusing himself watching an amateur try to play it. But Danny's an opportunistic crook, not a stone killer, and therefore he's boxing out of his class trying to intimidate a woman who isn't even surprised to discover her cold-blooded gift for murder and manipulation. They meet in public parks, dark street corners, his own dingy apartment; he takes her in his arms with cynical coercion, exacting the heavy's traditional fee: "I think probably someday you will kill me. And I wouldn't want that to happen unless we were good friends." Not so many scenes later, he's wrecked by his own complicity in her crimes, staring at her with unsteady, appalled awe: "Don't ever change, Tiger. I don't think I'd like you with a heart." In the dark cities of film noir, a woman who can go through Dan Duryea like Kleenex is a force to be reckoned with.
Especially because she dominates the film, then, it interests me that Jane is not the only woman onscreen. Starting in the second act, the film devotes a secondary plot to the parallel relationship developing between Alan's skeptical sister Kathy (Kristine Miller) and the genial stranger who calls himself Don Blake (Don DeFore) and claims to have flown with Alan during the war. He's eventually crucial to the denouement, but her role is less clear-cut. She's the good girl of the story, reassuring the male portion of the audience that not all women will shoot their way out of the patriarchy if given half a chance,3 but she's also an active investigator of her sister-in-law's stories and suspicious movements, so strongly refusing to go along with Jane's narrative that she risks her own life. At their first meeting, she pulls Don brusquely into her apartment to keep him out of earshot of Jane. He's the first character who does not dismiss her concerns as some kind of natural feminine jealousy. I am a little sorry that she plays no direct role in the climax, but I find I am glad that she exists at all. She contributes to the plot rather than just decorating it, which is more than can be said for some women in movies.
You could tell the story from her point of view, of course. It would be a sort of domestic detective story, piecing together the truth of her brother's disappearance and the existence of the money and the man who wants it back in the face of official indifference and blossoming romance. With a little withholding of information, you could tell it from Don's perspective, and from Danny's it would be the most stereotypical noir plot of all, the man whose criminal impulses lead to his downfall at the hands of a woman even worse than he is. It's much more interesting following Jane. She's a hard protagonist to get close to. The film doesn't care. She's not glamorous, she doesn't scheme with style; she's chilly and quick-thinking, improvising from crime to crime with unemphatic ruthlessness. We watch her graduate from theft to manslaughter to premeditated murder—greased with plenty of fibs and misdirection—finding at every stage that she can get away with it and so seeing no reason to stop. The script offers no hint of prior misbehavior, but her lack of conscience seems to disturb her as little as a hitherto unknown capacity for perfect pitch or calculating digits of pi. And the money is important in itself, but after a certain point it's holding on to the money that matters more than whatever she does with it. It's a symbol, like her husband's Colt M1911A1, and she knows it; it's power and she has no reason to give it up.
( He's lying—the money's mine. )
So, basically, I celebrated the turn of the year in a benevolent frame of mind, reassured of the essential decency of my fellow human beings. Really, I watched the ball drop in Times Square with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel after making our traditional New Year's Eve fondue. It's hard to get less cynical than that. This resolution brought to you by my festive backers at Patreon.
1. I disqualify Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) for the reasons detailed here and my memories of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) suggest a folie à deux rather than cold-blooded exploitation. Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945), scornfully stringing along a lovelorn Edward G. Robinson for money he doesn't actually have, seems much closer to the classical description. I'll report further when I've seen Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Gilda (1946), and Out of the Past (1947).
2. Audiences who liked to see Duryea raise a hand to his leading ladies didn't even have to wait in Scarlet Street—he's introduced beating Bennett on a street corner in what looks like an unambiguous instance of pimp-on-prostitute violence and is only half-satisfactorily retconned by the script as a tawdry, sex-driven bad romance. That said, it is a knockout of the species. The sleaze quotient in the atmosphere triples whenever the film returns to Duryea's Johnny and Bennett's Kitty in their natural habitat, a well-rumpled bed in a messy apartment, the floor strewn with a progression of discarded clothes leading to Johnny faceplanted in the pillows—shoes still on, suspenders half off, slick hair mussed to hell and gone—while Kitty in her slip with her housecoat falling open freshens her powder in the other room. They're terrible people. She's an indolent chiseler who's mistaken great sex for true love while he's a flashy good-for-nothing who slaps his girlfriend around, encourages her to make nice to rich men and then rifles her purse for the take, and draws fine moral distinctions like "It's only blackmail, baby, when you're dumb enough to get caught." Their sexual chemistry is the most appealing thing about them, because it's real and mutual, the kind where they can't keep their hands off each other; when Edward G. Robinson's Chris torments himself with thoughts of their ghosts locked forever in an endless sexual loop, it's hard to argue he'd be wrong. As far as I can tell, Lang dodged the Code on this movie by making sure to observe the suitably crime-deterrent downer ending and then flat-out ignoring the rest. I did not expect to come out mourning that Duryea and Bennett were never cast in a production of The Threepenny Opera. They'd have done Brecht's "Tango-Ballad" proud.
3. In one respect, however, she's more subversive than Jane. Prior to the advent of Danny's ill-gotten gains, Jane's only financial leverage has come through the men in her life, her first husband whom she explicitly married for his money, well-meaning Alan whom she laments gave her "a dozen down payments and installments for the rest of our lives!" Kathy has a job. "How are things at the office?" Jane asks in their first scene together. "Well, they gave my boss a promotion the other day," Kathy sighs. "Maybe they'll get around to giving me a raise later." Jane raises an eyebrow: "You sound as though you're going to make a life's work of it." I suppose we are meant to assume she'll cut out all that independent stuff when she marries Don after all, but in the meantime it gives her, legitimately, a degree of the same freedom that Jane can obtain only through theft and violence. I do not think it is an accident that after a certain point in her criminal career, Jane reverts to her maiden name.
skygiants, I've found our third housewife noir, or whatever we want to call the genre formerly theorized from the existence of Black Angel (1946) and The Reckless Moment (1949). It's called Too Late for Tears (1949), it stars Lizabeth Scott, and it's a doozy. Right up until the inevitable moral payback, it's rather like the origin story of a femme fatale.Meet Jane Palmer, played by Scott in what is now considered her career-defining role—TCM ran it in memoriam of her death in January 2015. I'd never seen her before. I should like to see her again. The actress has a look of Lauren Bacall, but harder cut, with prominent cheekbones and a heavy mouth; the character keeps her eyes always a little narrowed, disdainful, difficult to see into. She can put on the persuasion with her husky voice, but it sounds truest when she's issuing flat, cold directives like "People saw me come onto this boat with my husband and they'll see me get off with him" to a man who isn't her husband and is just now beginning to realize where that leaves him, alone at night with a woman who stands no higher than his shoulder and holds a pistol with a lot more steel. He will nickname her "Tiger," hardly joking at all. "I didn't know they made them as beautiful as you are," he marvels, "and as smart—or as hard." But we don't meet her from his perspective, as usually happens with beautiful, deadly women and outclassed men. We open the movie with Jane herself, the night her bland suburban life is sideswiped by the underworld, more or less literally when a stranger in a passing car suddenly hurls a suitcase containing $100,000 in unmarked bills into the back seat of the Palmers' convertible. Very obviously, these are not kosher C-notes. So what would you do if someone else's payoff landed in your lap? For Jane, it's the once-in-a-lifetime windfall that answers all of their prayers, or hers at least. All her life, she's been striving to afford the lifestyle she never had the chance to get accustomed to: "We were white-collar poor, middle-class poor, the kind of people who can't keep up with the Joneses and die a little every day because they can't." For her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy), who's reconciled himself to the fact that "there'll always be Joneses with a little more," the money is nothing but "a blind alley with a big barred gate at the end." He's right, of course, with the title there like cautionary neon from the start, but what's impressive is the run the movie gives Jane first.
As she's only the second instance of an unequivocal femme fatale I've seen in the wild,1 it's difficult for me to gauge whether Jane behaves entirely according to the rules of her archetype, but I found it striking that while she does use her sexuality to get what she needs from men, she also uses—quite effectively—violence. The first killing really looks like an accident, but she doesn't hesitate to turn it to her advantage. The second is no mistake. Two other attempts are averted by the vagaries of the plot, not by the intervention of conscience or feminine weakness. The latter makes an excellent ruse, though, and it almost never fails. Men are always ready to help out or take advantage, or think they're doing one or the other of these things. In this department the film benefits cleverly from its casting of Dan Duryea. His first appearance in Too Late for Tears feels deliberately reminiscent of his star-making entrance in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944). There he was a crooked ex-cop turned blackmailer, searching Joan Bennett's rooms with insouciant creepiness, as if he were frisking her body instead of her liquor cabinet, her perfume table, her dresser drawers; the sense of menace he offers is lazy rather than volatile, a lanky figure in a straw boater and a double-breasted dark suit who talks extortion with such a drawling smile that the careless quickness with which he hits Bennett in the face is actually shocking, snake-strike nasty.2 As Danny Fuller, supposed P.I. in search of the missing cash, he investigates the Palmers' apartment with similarly invasive efficiency; he even offers Jane a few sharp smacks when she disclaims the whereabouts of his "dough." The familiar half-smirk is in place, as is the malicious air of knowing the game and amusing himself watching an amateur try to play it. But Danny's an opportunistic crook, not a stone killer, and therefore he's boxing out of his class trying to intimidate a woman who isn't even surprised to discover her cold-blooded gift for murder and manipulation. They meet in public parks, dark street corners, his own dingy apartment; he takes her in his arms with cynical coercion, exacting the heavy's traditional fee: "I think probably someday you will kill me. And I wouldn't want that to happen unless we were good friends." Not so many scenes later, he's wrecked by his own complicity in her crimes, staring at her with unsteady, appalled awe: "Don't ever change, Tiger. I don't think I'd like you with a heart." In the dark cities of film noir, a woman who can go through Dan Duryea like Kleenex is a force to be reckoned with.
Especially because she dominates the film, then, it interests me that Jane is not the only woman onscreen. Starting in the second act, the film devotes a secondary plot to the parallel relationship developing between Alan's skeptical sister Kathy (Kristine Miller) and the genial stranger who calls himself Don Blake (Don DeFore) and claims to have flown with Alan during the war. He's eventually crucial to the denouement, but her role is less clear-cut. She's the good girl of the story, reassuring the male portion of the audience that not all women will shoot their way out of the patriarchy if given half a chance,3 but she's also an active investigator of her sister-in-law's stories and suspicious movements, so strongly refusing to go along with Jane's narrative that she risks her own life. At their first meeting, she pulls Don brusquely into her apartment to keep him out of earshot of Jane. He's the first character who does not dismiss her concerns as some kind of natural feminine jealousy. I am a little sorry that she plays no direct role in the climax, but I find I am glad that she exists at all. She contributes to the plot rather than just decorating it, which is more than can be said for some women in movies.
You could tell the story from her point of view, of course. It would be a sort of domestic detective story, piecing together the truth of her brother's disappearance and the existence of the money and the man who wants it back in the face of official indifference and blossoming romance. With a little withholding of information, you could tell it from Don's perspective, and from Danny's it would be the most stereotypical noir plot of all, the man whose criminal impulses lead to his downfall at the hands of a woman even worse than he is. It's much more interesting following Jane. She's a hard protagonist to get close to. The film doesn't care. She's not glamorous, she doesn't scheme with style; she's chilly and quick-thinking, improvising from crime to crime with unemphatic ruthlessness. We watch her graduate from theft to manslaughter to premeditated murder—greased with plenty of fibs and misdirection—finding at every stage that she can get away with it and so seeing no reason to stop. The script offers no hint of prior misbehavior, but her lack of conscience seems to disturb her as little as a hitherto unknown capacity for perfect pitch or calculating digits of pi. And the money is important in itself, but after a certain point it's holding on to the money that matters more than whatever she does with it. It's a symbol, like her husband's Colt M1911A1, and she knows it; it's power and she has no reason to give it up.
( He's lying—the money's mine. )
So, basically, I celebrated the turn of the year in a benevolent frame of mind, reassured of the essential decency of my fellow human beings. Really, I watched the ball drop in Times Square with
derspatchel after making our traditional New Year's Eve fondue. It's hard to get less cynical than that. This resolution brought to you by my festive backers at Patreon.1. I disqualify Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) for the reasons detailed here and my memories of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) suggest a folie à deux rather than cold-blooded exploitation. Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945), scornfully stringing along a lovelorn Edward G. Robinson for money he doesn't actually have, seems much closer to the classical description. I'll report further when I've seen Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Gilda (1946), and Out of the Past (1947).
2. Audiences who liked to see Duryea raise a hand to his leading ladies didn't even have to wait in Scarlet Street—he's introduced beating Bennett on a street corner in what looks like an unambiguous instance of pimp-on-prostitute violence and is only half-satisfactorily retconned by the script as a tawdry, sex-driven bad romance. That said, it is a knockout of the species. The sleaze quotient in the atmosphere triples whenever the film returns to Duryea's Johnny and Bennett's Kitty in their natural habitat, a well-rumpled bed in a messy apartment, the floor strewn with a progression of discarded clothes leading to Johnny faceplanted in the pillows—shoes still on, suspenders half off, slick hair mussed to hell and gone—while Kitty in her slip with her housecoat falling open freshens her powder in the other room. They're terrible people. She's an indolent chiseler who's mistaken great sex for true love while he's a flashy good-for-nothing who slaps his girlfriend around, encourages her to make nice to rich men and then rifles her purse for the take, and draws fine moral distinctions like "It's only blackmail, baby, when you're dumb enough to get caught." Their sexual chemistry is the most appealing thing about them, because it's real and mutual, the kind where they can't keep their hands off each other; when Edward G. Robinson's Chris torments himself with thoughts of their ghosts locked forever in an endless sexual loop, it's hard to argue he'd be wrong. As far as I can tell, Lang dodged the Code on this movie by making sure to observe the suitably crime-deterrent downer ending and then flat-out ignoring the rest. I did not expect to come out mourning that Duryea and Bennett were never cast in a production of The Threepenny Opera. They'd have done Brecht's "Tango-Ballad" proud.
3. In one respect, however, she's more subversive than Jane. Prior to the advent of Danny's ill-gotten gains, Jane's only financial leverage has come through the men in her life, her first husband whom she explicitly married for his money, well-meaning Alan whom she laments gave her "a dozen down payments and installments for the rest of our lives!" Kathy has a job. "How are things at the office?" Jane asks in their first scene together. "Well, they gave my boss a promotion the other day," Kathy sighs. "Maybe they'll get around to giving me a raise later." Jane raises an eyebrow: "You sound as though you're going to make a life's work of it." I suppose we are meant to assume she'll cut out all that independent stuff when she marries Don after all, but in the meantime it gives her, legitimately, a degree of the same freedom that Jane can obtain only through theft and violence. I do not think it is an accident that after a certain point in her criminal career, Jane reverts to her maiden name.
