Too Late for Tears

Plot

Jane and Alan Palmer (Scott and Kennedy) are driving to a party in the Hollywood Hills when someone in another car throws a suitcase into the back seat of their convertible. They open it and discover packs of cash. They are chased by yet another car but get away. Back at their Hollywood apartment, they examine what Alan estimates to be $100,000 in cash. Jane wants to keep the money; Alan wants to take it to the police. He places the suitcase in a locker at Union Station, hoping he can sway Jane into surrendering it to the police.

A few days later, Danny (Duryea) shows up at the Palmers' apartment, tells Jane he is a detective and quickly learns she has begun spending the money. Alan likewise becomes upset when he finds she has been running up bills, clearly planning to spend the money they had agreed to leave untouched. Jane makes a deal with Danny to split the money. Planning to kill him, she drives Danny up into the hills on the pretense they will retrieve the cash where it's been buried. He suspects her intentions and flees.

She and Alan plan a romantic evening together to make amends for their squabbling about the money. She asks Danny to meet her at Westlake Park near downtown Los Angeles, where she has planned to kill her husband Alan on a boat ride. Jane feels a pang of guilt, then blurts out that she wants to send the claim check for the locker to the police. Unaware of why his wife is upset, Alan picks up her bag and his own gun falls out. Jane can tell he knows what she has in mind. She grabs the gun, they struggle and she shoots, killing him. Danny sees the body and fears getting involved in a murder, but Jane threatens to tell the police he killed her husband unless he helps her. After dumping the body in the lake, they leave the park together so as to mislead witnesses into thinking she left with her husband. She reports Alan to the police as a missing person.

Don Blake (DeFore) appears at the Palmer apartment, where he discovers Alan's sister Kathy (Kristine Miller) leaving surreptitiously. Don introduces himself to her as an old army buddy of Alan's on vacation in Los Angeles. Kathy lives across the hall and has grown worried about her missing brother. She is leery of Jane, whose previous husband had a mysterious death. Jane finds out that Don never knew Alan and hits him over the head with a pistol. Retrieving the cash at Union Station, she finds a drunken Danny and asks him to help her run away. Jane demands to know where the money came from. Danny says it was a "once in a lifetime" blackmail payoff from an insurance scam. She understands this means the money is unmarked and its disappearance won't be reported to the police. She kills Danny with a poisoned drink.

After finding Danny's body, the Los Angeles police tell Don that if he wants them to drag the small lake at Westlake Park in search of Jane's missing husband, it'll cost thousands of dollars and that they don't believe his theories. Jane flees with all the money to Mexico City, where she has a penthouse at the posh Reforma Hotel. Don turns up at her door. Concluding he is either after the money or with the police, Jane pleads with him to take half. Don tells her he is the brother of Jane's earlier, first husband, Bob Blanchard, and that he now understands how she could have driven him into killing himself. As Mexican police detectives rush into the room, Jane quickly backs away in tears onto a balcony, then screams as she falls over the railing to her death.

Cast

Critical response

When the film was released The New York Times wrote:

If proof be needed at this point that money is the root of all evil—a theme, incidentally, which has been the root of more than one motion picture—then Too Late for Tears, which came to the Mayfair on Saturday, is proof positive. For producer Hunt Stromberg, director Byron Haskin and scenarist Roy Huggins, who adapted his own Saturday Evening Post serial, herein have fashioned an effective melodramatic elaboration of that theme. Despite an involved plot and an occasional overabundance of palaver, not all of which is bright, this yarn about a cash-hungry dame who doesn't let men or conscience stand in her way, is an adult and generally suspenseful adventure.

Film critic Dennis Schwartz also wrote a favorable review:

Byron Haskin's low-budget film noir makes good use of its Los Angeles locale and its lady bluebeard is fun to watch as she does her nasty gun thing with her nice guy hubby and rotten poison thing with her boyfriend (she took care of her first hubby off camera, so we're not sure how he got it!)...Though a minor film noir, it relates to the ambitions the middle-class had during the postwar period to better their life materially and socially. Jane's drive for wealth was so extreme that she will not stop at murder to rise above her impoverished middle-class circumstances, and her warped character is used to show how money can't buy one happiness. The husky-voiced winsome smiling Lizabeth Scott turns in a finely tuned performance as the femme fatale; while Dan Duryea is in his element as the alcoholic weak-kneed cad, who shows he doesn't have as much stomach for his criminal mischief as does his lady accomplice.