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My 6th Noir in a self-managed study of Noir.

The web of deceit weaved by this crazy blond is a marvel to behold. Her brazen disregard for common sense, and the way she controls people around her, make her quite hate-worthy, which would make the actress Lizabeth Scott pleased to know.

Kristine Miller stole my heart with her grace and femininity as the innocent in-law, trying to make sense of the mad house of characters dropping in and out of her brother's apartment.

The toxic, manipulative love/hate relationship portrayed by Dan Duryea and Lizabeth Scott radiated sparks of electricity. See if *you* can figure out where that thing is headed. Only one of them can get the upper hand in this caper.

As I watched the version on Archive.org, I found myself wondering, "How are they going to wrap this up with only a few minutes to go?" knowing the clock is running out only heightens the tension of this nifty Noir.

Why aren't more people suspicious around such toxic characters? Maybe we all dread looking behind that curtain. Classic tragedy speaks to this.

This is some excellent story-telling, and is highly recommended.

Made in 1949 this is one of those films that is a must for all noir fans. Do be warned though as this fell out of copyright some years ago and was widely duplicated – often very badly – but this is the restored version and is an absolute gem.

Late one night a couple are driving to a party that is far from inviting when a slow car tosses a bag into their open top car. The bag is choc full f cash. The wife is Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott) and she decides that she is going to hang onto the cash – despite what her husband wants. So she decides to convince him to keep it. He is cut from a different cloth and it soon becomes apparent how far she will go to keep it.

Now Lizabeth Scott is a show stealer here and that is even though everyone else is great too. She is so convincing as the manipulative and self centred vixen and I just loved it. As I said earlier watch out for poor copies or better still get the restored version. For those of you that love fashion, there are some timeless and elegant gowns on display here too and the men all wear zoot suits so you can't win 'em all. This is a must for all fans of the genre and one that has aged with style.

This is a solid and sometimes memorable crime drama, filled with tension, and featuring some pretty good performances from the cast. The noir atmosphere works well, and the story, while perhaps far-fetched at a couple of points, is quite involved and grabs your attention from the beginning.

Lizabeth Scott gets one of her best roles, as a hard-hearted woman who seizes her opportunity to play the male characters against each other so that she can get what she wants. Scott is slightly lacking in the glamour that would make her a really memorable femme fatale, but she has plenty of strength, and her voice works well for the character. Dan Duryea gives one of his many fine noir performances, taking good advantage of his many opportunities with his shady character. Arthur Kennedy and Kristine Miller are both sympathetic as the more innocent of the main characters. Don DeFore's character sometimes seems a little out of place, but he is often crucial in advancing the plot.

The story starts with an unlikely coincidence, with a bag of money that gets tossed into the wrong car. But from there, most of the story developments follow naturally, and the tension is built up rather well as things get more complicated. It's an entertaining movie that has most of the things that fans of film-noir and crime drama would want to see.

Byron Haskin of Arsenic and Old Lace and War of the Worlds fame teamed up with Roy Huggins to create this solid film noir entry. Huggins writing is superb for the genre - neither pretentious nor overly manic. The pace is brisk but not painfully so. And the film is very well conceived, well directed, well edited and very well acted.

The remarkable Lizabeth Scott (Jane Palmer), married to a young Arthur Kennedy (Alan Palmer), is the focus of our attention. The coupled are driving to a friend's house when a car flashes them and its occupant tosses a leather bag with 60,000 dollars into their car and drives off. Jane wants to keep it, Alan wants to turn it in. Soon, this windfall becomes a mixed blessing, as it reveals a rather frightening side of Jane's personality. The plot intertwines noir twists and turns and incessant mystery and, frequently, winds up in unanticipated places.

Lizabeth Scott is PERFECT, and really MAKES this film as much as the intriguing story and successful directing. Don Defore also turns in a notable performance as does Kristine Miller. Dan Duryea was nicely cast in his role as the heavy, but his performance here was just a sliver below his usual par.

This is very nice bit of noir cinema and will satisfy most noir fans, as well as modern crime drama aficionados. Recommended!

This is the ultimate B noir. You even end up loving its flaws. Every minute is entertaining and you don't know what lengths Lizabeth will go to next. That is why I won't say a single word about the plot.

Copies of this are all over the place for free so there is no excuse not to check it out.

Lizabeth Scott sinks her teeth into the role of a ruthless woman in "Too Late for Tears," also known as "Killer Bait," a 1949 film directed by Byron Haskin and written by a man who later became a very popular TV writer-director and creator of some top series, Roy Huggins.

The film also stars Dan Duryea, Don DeFore, and Arthur Kennedy.

Scott plays Jane Palmer, the wife of Alan Palmer (Kennedy) - while driving one night, someone from another car throws a satchel into their car. It turns out to be $60,000 (the equivalent of $598,000 today). Alan doesn't want anything to do with it, preferring to take it to the police, but Jane wants to keep it and spend it. Finally she convinces him to hide the money and wait for a time.

Jane, it turns out, is one tough cookie, and without giving much away, let's say that getting her hands on that money becomes her full time job, and she's determined that nothing and no one will stand in her way. Unfortunately for a few people, they stood in her way.

Really terrific noir set in Hollywood, with Dan Duryea playing a sleaze, but actually less of a sleaze than Jane - he's more of an opportunist than evil; Don Defore is friendly and unassuming as a friend of Alan Palmer's, and Arthur Kennedy, one of the finest actors in film, is just plain wasted. Perhaps this was a film he had to do in order to fulfill a contract, or it was a loanout on trade - it was a waste.

It's Scott's film, and with her husky voice, lovely smile and pouty lips, she's able to, at first anyway, hide a core of steel underneath.

Very good. If you're a fan of film noir, see this one.

Lizabeth Scott did her best remembered work in film noir (more than half of her only 21 screen credits fall within the noir cycle), and became one of its iconic faces. Rarely, however, was she called upon to play the fully-fledged femme fatale, and there's probably a reason for this: She couldn't bring off duplicity.

Her smile had no shadings into wry, or ironic, or smirky; it had but one setting – a fresh, guileless grin that lit up like a Christmas tree. F. Scott Fitzgerald (in his sad screenwriting days) observed of Joan Crawford that you couldn't give her a simple stage direction like `telling a lie' because then she'd give an impersonation of Benedict Arnold betraying West Point to the British. But Scott can't manage even that, which results in confusingly mixed signals when her characters are motivated by malice, like Coral Chandler in Dead Reckoning: Her smile keeps convincing us that she's on the up-and-up.

Her damn smile keeps switching on in Too Late For Tears, even though there's no doubt that she's one hard, cold case. She and husband Arthur Kennedy are bickering one night en route to a party in the Hollywood Hills when suddenly a suitcase crammed with cash lands in their roadster. He wants to turn it over to the police, but she persuades him to think it over, so they check the valise at Union Station. When she starts buying clothes and furs against the checked capital, it's clear she has no intention of surrendering the windfall; we learn that her background was `white-collar poor, middle-class poor,' and that she'd made a previous marriage solely for money.

Strange men start ringing her doorbell. First Dan Duryea shows up, a blackmailer for whom the payoff was intended. He slaps her around playfully (`What do they call you – besides stupid,' she taunts him. `Stupid will do – if you don't bruise easily,' he purrs back). Quickly Scott maneuvers Duryea into helping him murder Kennedy but still won't tell him where the money's stashed. Though wary, he falls for her, starts hitting the bottle, and grows careless. Meanwhile, Kennedy's sister (Kristine Miller) harbors suspicions about his mysterious disappearance. When the next caller (Don DeFore) shows up, claiming to be an old Air Corps buddy of Kennedy's, she makes an alliance with him to find out what's really going on. And the claim ticket for the money keeps changing hands....

The plot is none too simple, and in consequence director Byron Haskin spends a lot of time trying to keep it clear rather than addressing some questions about character and logic that inevitably arise. Why did the avaricious, manipulative Scott marry Kennedy in the first (or second) place? Why does the sister live so conveniently close? How did Duryea, and for that matter DeFore, find Scott so easily? But few thriller plots are so tightly constructed that they survive rigorous analysis. Too Late For Tears passes muster as hard-boiled, late-40s noir and as one of Scott's hardest, strongest performances, inappropriate smile and all.

So what would YOU do if someone chucked a suitcase containing $60,000 into the backseat of your car? Well, if you're film noir "bad girl" Lizabeth Scott in the 1949 picture "Too Late For Tears," the answer is a no-brainer: Drive off as fast as you can and try to keep your greedy mitts on it! For Arthur Kennedy, playing her husband, the issue is not quite so cut and dried. And things become even more problematic when the tough guy who this payoff was intended for, portrayed by the great Dan Duryea, comes knocking at their door, all leading to gunfire, a poisoning, double crosses and still more double crosses, in this very entertaining if minor noir effort. The film is a somewhat contrived affair, made on the cheap--it almost strikes one as a "B picture" with an A-list cast--but ultimately succeeds in winning the viewer over, largely due to some fine performances. While Scott's sexpot charms have always been lost on me, it is hard to deny her great acting abilities, and Dan Duryea here almost single-handedly manages to turn a routine potboiler into something quite memorable (hardly the first time he did this for a picture; Duryea was certainly one of the great character actors of the 1940s). Director Byron Haskin, who would go on to helm some of my favorite pictures, such as "The War of the Worlds," "The Naked Jungle" and "Robinson Crusoe on Mars," here shows that he was quite capable of creating a film in the noir genre, as well. Kudos also to Don DeFore (whom baby boomers may remember from the 1960s TV show "Hazel") for his mysteriously motivated snoopy character. In all, a fun if lesser noir. Too bad that the DVD in question here is another crummy-looking one from Alpha Video. This is a company that has a gigantic catalog of "public domain" films, most of which have been put onto DVD with zero effort at film restoration. While the company does serve its niche, watching its films CAN be a bitch!

In the earliest days of TV, local channels used to fill up all their excess time with low-budget films from indie companies, as the 'majors' initially refused to sell or lease their product to what they considered (at the time) a mortal enemy - the small screen, which threatened to keep their regular customers at home. So for those of us who grew up during the fifties, much of our evening time was spent watching the cheaply made films from the thirties and forties, which - for all we knew at the time - were the important releases of that era. One of the most oft telecast films was Too Late For Tears, a turgid but in many ways fascinating B-budget noir that can't compare to the classics of that genre (this is no Big Sleep, mind you) but never fails to interest a viewer. Perhaps that's because the plot is so unique. Ordinarily, as in The Maltese Falcon and dozens of other noirs, the femme fatale is up to no good from the moment we meet here, and hails from a strange netherworld of dirty money and tawdry eroticism. Here, Lizabeth Scott plays a normal everyday suburban style woman who likely has never even received a parking ticket. But when she an her husband (Arthur Kennedy) find themselves on a lonely stretch of highway at night, a car zips buy and throws a bag of money into theirs - the passerby was expecting someone else, and tossed the loot into the wrong car. The husband wants to turn the money over to the police, but something ignites in the woman - she literally explodes before our eyes into the most deadly femme fatale of all, made all the more alluring by Scott's butch/androgynous sex appeal. The casting is all wrong - Don De Fore, who shows up as a tough guy, should've been the husband, with Arthur Kennedy in Don's role - but there's a great part for Dan Duryea as a sleazy character who falls under Liz's hypnotic spell. A contrived ending hurts the impact, but for noir completists, this is one you have (despite its flaws) to see.

In Los Angeles, Alan Palmer (Arthur Kennedy) and his wife Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott) are driving to a party when a suitcase is thrown in the back seat of their car. When they open the suitcase, they find a large amount but they are chased by another car and they flee. Alan decides to deliver the money to the police, but Jane opposes and wants to keep it. So Alan decides to keep the suitcase with the money in a locker at the Union Station to decide what to do. A couple of days later, Jane spends a large amount in furs and other gifts for her. Then a man called Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) comes to their apartment and Jane believes he is a detective and let him in; but soon she learns that he is also seeking the money. When Alan returns from his work and finds the shopping, he becomes upset and Jane does not tell anything about Danny. During the night, Alan and Jane go to a boat ride to make amends and she accidentally kills him with his pistol. Danny is forced to help her to dump the body in a lake and Jane reports to the police that her husband is missing. Her sister-in-law Kathy Palmer (Kristine Miller) that lives in the same floor snoops around Jane's apartment and finds the receipt of the locker. When she is sneaking out, she meets the stranger Don Blake (Don DeFore) that tells that is Alan's friend. Meanwhile Jane is seeking the receipt to get the money for her. Why the money was thrown to the backseat of the Palmer's convertible? Who will keep the money? Who are Danny and Don Blake?

"Too Late for Tears" is a great film with all the elements of the film- noir: there is the sordid motive, the femme fatale and many twists. This movie is probably one of the best roles of the gorgeous Lizabeth Scott. The DVD release by "Dark City" has a poor video that needs restoration. But it is worthwhile watching since the story is excellent. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): Not Available on DVD or Blu-Ray

After viewing "Detour" and watching Vera, I was surprised to find another utterly cold woman who could hold her own. Jane, in this film, is about as cold blooded as one can get. She had not hesitation about knocking off anyone that gets in her way. Her husband is the first. He intense facial expressions as she works her magic to keep her hands on the $60,000 that was tossed into the family convertible are incredible. She is a masterful liar and manipulator. She finds herself in a world that she can't control completely. Money is her master and a high life style her goal. Her poor sap husband adores her and pays the price. Then it's a series of manipulations to get her way, even though she is dealing with some pretty tough cookies. She is so unlikeable that you root for someone to put a stop to her, but she is also hard not to look at. It's much more than I anticipated. The acting is really top notch, especially the female lead.

This is an entertaining classic film noir.

This film is public domain, and I am reading other users complain about the poor quality of a DVD copy. Basically, anyone who has a terrible copy of the film can legally sell a DVD of it. This film has been restored by UCLA Film & TV Archives, and that is the version to watch. Crisp, clear picture; commendable job of restoration!

No need to recap the convoluted plot. The movie's a sleeper among noirs, thanks mainly to an unpredictable and well thought-out screenplay from writer Huggins. Just when you think you've got things figured, you don't. I especially like the way Huggins subtly reverses Jane's (Scott) and Danny's (Duryea) competitive relationship. Watching the two circle each other is like watching two hungry sharks. Apparently, they want to mate but don't dare get too close. Note too, how effectively director Haskin uses the stylish wide-brimmed hats to veil the identity of men entering a room. I don't recall this clever effect in any other film. This is also one of the few noirs to make the central character a woman (Jane) instead of a man.

Then too, it's a very well cast movie. Duryea is of course Duryea, a major icon of noir. On the other hand, Scott was always more a presence than an actress. Still, her presence here is used to good effect as a greedy spider woman, even if she doesn't achieve much depth. But I especially like the underrated Don DeFore. His trademark nice guy is also used to good effect in what turns out to be something more than just a nice guy. (Be sure to catch ex-Dead End kid Billy Halop as the cranky boat manager.)

I guess the only missing element from classic noir are the angular shadows of moral ambivalence. Haskin does film a number of night scenes, but I don't spot the classic lighting. Perhaps that's because his specialty as a director was science fiction and adventure films. Anyway, I'm not sure why this withering little drama hasn't achieved more recognition. Maybe it's because it was an independent production without studio backing. But whatever the reason, the movie remains a gritty little noir worth catching up with.

One of the definitive marks of a film noir for me has always been the presence of a morally vacuous, poisonously stupid, pathologically lying, cold blooded murderess who sucks (or attempts to suck) all associated with her(esp. men) into a whirling abyss of nothingness. This one fits the bill, as noir as they come. Fools you, too: at first I was turned off by the film because Scott and the Plott just seemed stupid and uninteresting...boy does she get interesting...film ramps up in quality quite remarkably after the first twenty minutes or so...from then on a nice toxic mix which kept me suspended until the end. Then again maybe I'm not bright.

I wish the film quality were better on this, hovers around the barely tolerable.

This movie is worth searching for. It features great performances from Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea. This may be Scott's finest role. As the story progresses, she becomes more motivated and corrupted by greed. They sure don't write stories like this anymore! Too bad the production was so low budget and the film quality has deteriorated. This one will keep you on the edge of your seat.

This film noir was turning out to be a big disappointment but picked up the pace nicely with some interesting twists when Don DeFore's character "Don Blake" entered the story

Meanwhile, Lizabeth Scott ("Jane Palmer") was convincing as the femme fatale and Dan Duryea ("Danny Fuller") was his normal entertaining character complete with some good, wisecracking lines. However, DeFore is the guy who rally snaps this film out of the doldrums.

This is a story of greed and what it can do to people, particularly if they aren't that moral to begin with!

It's nice to see this out on DVD, although, from what I have read elsewhere, I don't believe a decent print of this movie has been made available.

Though listed here at IMDb as "Too Late for Tears," the version I saw went by the much better title, "Killer Bait."

Whatever you want to call it, this is low-budget film noir at its best. Lizabeth Scott plays one of the most fatale femmes in noir history, a housewife whose desire to keep up with the Joneses turns her into a mercenary murderer. Through the kind of chance accident that so often kicks off the plots of films noir, she and her husband (Arthur Kennedy) become custodians of $60K that was going to be used to pay off a blackmailer. Not surprisingly, the blackmailer comes calling to collect, and he's not surprisingly played by Dan Duryea, who played sardonic unctuousness better than anyone. He thinks he can bully these inexperienced nobodies into giving him the money back, but he has no idea what he's in for with this no longer very demure housewife. Indeed, the film almost makes a joke out of how scared Duryea becomes of her, feeling the need to have a gun on him any time he's going to meet up with her.

"Killer Bait" is an example of why I love noir. These films were cheap and obscure. They weren't made to be big money makers and there wasn't as much need to make them crowd pleasing. For that reason, they're more honest than the big studio products of the time, cynical about American life in a way that other movies at the time weren't allowed to be. In this film, that pressure to conform to "normal" middle class existence in the post-war years, and the need to define one's success relative to others in materialistic terms, is enough to make one kill. Lizabeth Scott's character is American capitalist society taken to nightmarish extremes.

Directed by special effects wizard Byron Haskin, who proves that he's as at home in the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles as he is on the surface of Mars.

Grade: A

A marvel of attitudes and styles that now seem cheesy, yet so pithy and fun that you can't look away. Lizabeth Scott is the femme fatale embodied and Dan Duryea is great as the poor dupe who can't help but succumb to her siren call.

This film features one of my favorite lines in classic cinema, uttered by Scott: "Well, housewives can get get awfully bored sometimes..."

Has there ever been a more perfect example of the antihero lead than Dan Duryea in this film? You don't know whether to hate him for his impotent resistance to Lizabeth Scott's machinations or to offer to buy him a beer.

In a somewhat confused story line Too Late For Tears propagates the old adage of finders keepers to an 11th Commandment. Some money finds its way into Lizabeth Scott's hands and she's determined to keep it at all costs.

Lizabeth Scott is working on her allure in this film with all cylinders burning. Here she and husband Arthur Kennedy who seem happy enough get a satchel full of money tossed into their convertible by a speeding car going the other direction. It's about $60,000.00 bucks, yesterday I considered myself lucky to have found a dollar bill accidentally tossed in a waste paper basket at a bank.

You might keep a dollar, but someone is sure going to miss that $60,000.00. And he does in the person of Dan Duryea as menacing and as smarmy as he is in these kinds of films. Most women would flinch from this guy, but then Scott reveals some surprises in her character. Pretty soon she and Duryea have an alliance of sorts and that means real trouble for Kennedy.

Other prominent roles are Kristine Miller as Kennedy's sister and Don DeFore as a stranger claiming to be an old war buddy of Kennedy's who happens to be looking him up.

Scott degeneration of character is really something to see. You did get a hint of it toward the beginning when talks about her hard scrabble background as a kid, still she's quite a revelation.

Some really good acting especially by Lizabeth Scott carries this independent film from United Artists over a few rough patches.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave..."

If you ask me - I'd say that Lizabeth Scott playing Jane Palmer, the ruthless, conniving femme fatale, in this 1949 Crime/Thriller just didn't have the acting chops to cut the mustard. Not only did I find Scott to be very unconvincing in her part, but I also found her portrayal to be quite annoying, as well.

I think that Kristine Miller, who played the Kathy Palmer character in the story, would have been a much more competent and believable actress to tackle the Jane Palmer role.

For me, the highlight of this run-of-the-mill picture of greed and treachery was when mean, tough-guy, Dan Fuller, slapped Jane's pretty, little face but good, in order to get her to fess-up to the whereabouts of the $60,000.

All-in-all - Too Late For Tears was just another (of many) easily forgettable Crime-Dramas from Hollywood's apparent heyday.