A Forgotten Masterpiece Restored: TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949)

The set up is wonderfully simple. A woman named Jane Palmer and her husband, Alan, are driving home from a party one night when a bag full of money is tossed into their backseat from a passing car. The next day, they discover that the money is the payoff from a botched extortion drop. Alan wants to turn it over to the cops. Jane, alas, does not. That’s going to mean bad things for her husband.

So begins Byron Haskin’s TOO LATE FOR TEARS, one of the greatest—and most overlooked—of all film noirs. It was written by Roy Huggins who is best remembered today as the creator of hugely successful television shows like THE FUGITIVE and THE ROCKFORD FILES but who started his career as a hardboiled crime novelist in the vein of Cain and Chandler. This film, based on his excellent 1947 novel of the same name (first serialized in the SATURDAY EVENING POST), is a movie which has been nearly forgotten, even by many people who consider themselves noir fans. But while the film exists only in ragged prints and grainy DVDs, it remains an essential contribution to the genre.

It’s a femme fatale movie, but before we go further we need to unpack the phrase ‘femme fatale’ a little because femmes come in all shapes and sizes. Some are duplicitous girlfriends. Others are certifiable nutjobs who lure hapless men into their neurotic webs. Sometimes they’re sirens with a taste for married men, and sometimes they’re just bored housewives. What they all have in common is that they’re all bad news. 

Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott) is definitely bad news but TOO LATE FOR TEARS makes the diabolical suggestion that there might be a femme fatale hiding inside the ostensibly happily married woman. Like DOUBLE INDEMNITY this film sees the married woman—the symbol of fertility and domestication in most American films of the forties and fifties—as a cold blooded murderer lying in wait. Jane Palmer and Phyllis Dietrichson could be sisters.

Well, maybe. The major difference between DOUBLE INDEMNITY and TOO LATE FOR TEARS (indeed between TOO LATE FOR TEARS and most other femme fatale movies) is that Jane Palmer’s story is told from her point of view.

The truth is, most film noirs are about men. Even most femme fatale movies are told from the point of view of a man who meets a beautiful woman, falls in love (or lust) with her, and then suffers to his last breath. When Walter Neff sizes up Mrs. Dietrichson at the beginning of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, it’s his eyes we’re looking through. But in TOO LATE FOR TEARS we stay mostly with Jane Palmer. When we do leave her point of view, it is to drift momentarily to her suspicious sister-in-law Kathy (Kristine Miller) and Alan’s old army buddy Don (Don DeFore) as they attempt to bring Jane down. This, of course, builds suspense but also paradoxically strengthens our identification with Jane. She’s the smartest person in the movie. We’ve been with her from the beginning. When we eavesdrop on Kathy and Don plotting against her, we want to run off and tell Jane.

This identification with the femme fatale owes a lot to Lizabeth Scott’s performance, which alternates between desperation and cunning, and is perhaps the best one she ever gave. Part of what she brings to the role—and it is something that many iconic noir actresses (like Ann Savage and Marie Windsor) brought to their roles— is a sense of having been disappointed by life.. Scott was originally molded by studio executive Hal B. Wallis to be the new Lauren Bacall (just as Windsor was supposed to be the new Joan Crawford). When that A-list career didn’t materialize, she was relegated to B pictures, playing femme fatales and gangsters’ girlfriends. Something of her disappointment shows in her portrayals of women whose dreams have never come true, and this is especially true in TOO LATE FOR TEARS. No one in the audience could possibly root for her husband Alan (played by Arthur Kennedy as a befuddled bore). This poor sap comes across like a well-meaning prison warden standing guard over all of his wife’s dreams. We don’t yearn for his destruction, but we also don’t hate Liz for wanting to escape. And her escape starts to seem impossible once Ubervillian Dan Duryea shows up looking for his lost luggage.

With the possible exceptions of Kirk Douglas and Richard Widmark, no one ever played a son of a bitch better than Dan Duryea. And Duryea did them both better on one count: his raison d’être was terrorizing women. Inside the insular world of noir, Duryea was a woman’s worst nightmare: a charming, rakish ne’er-do-well who, when the going got tough, got tough with his woman. Duryea made this kind of thing watchable because he oozed sleazy charm and because he always wound up going to hell at the end. In TOO LATE FOR TEARS he turns on both the charm and the hard stuff, but no one slaps around Lizabeth Scott and lives to brag about it.

Ultimately, noir is built upon the themes of transgression and ruination. There is no doubt that Jane Palmer is a transgressor. She’s a thief and a cold-blooded killer. She earns her ruination. And yet the best noirs always find a way to implicate us in the guilt of the protagonist. Jane is eventually brought down by Kathy and Don, but while they’re supposed to represent the forces of normality, we never feel anything for them. Kathy is a bland cipher, and Don’s a smug asshole. We can easily imagine them sitting down with good old Alan for the most boring dinner party in the history of the world. And we can imagine Jane Palmer sitting there with them, suffocating on the inside and yearning for some excitement to drop into her lap.

***

For years TOO LATE FOR TEARS suffered the same fate of other noir classics like DETOUR and QUICKSAND. It was abandoned in the public domain —which means that you can watch this movie right now. Or you can buy one of many DVD copies (here's the best one). What you can’t do is find one in nice condition. This movie was dumped on the market, made ten cents, and then hit the market again as KILLER BAIT. As such it has been kicked around for fifty years, and once something is in the public domain any yokel with a disc burner could sell a copy. That made it impossible to find a copy that wasn’t washed out and covered in scratches. It also made it difficult to raise the funds for a restoration. The folks who pony up cash to refurbish obscure old movies understandably like to have the only product on the market (after all, unsuspecting buyers looking for a deal might buy the five dollar shit-version of the film rather than a decked out thirty dollar version). I remember speaking with Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller years ago about this film, and he hinted then that a restoration might be possible in the relatively near future. He knew as well as anyone that the film is indispensable, that it’s the Queen of Noir at her best, and it deserves the royal treatment. That restoration has come to pass, and on January 25 Muller and the Film Noir Foundation crew unveiled the new restored print of this great film. The movie will be on tour this year as the FNF does their annual NOIR CITY retrospectives around the country. Look for it.

***

One last word on Byron Haskin. A professional who worked in Hollywood as a special effects man, cinematographer, and director, Haskin is a mostly forgotten figure today. When he is remembered it is usually in conjunction with his extensive work in science fiction (he directed WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1952 and worked on the pilot episode of STAR TREK), but his contributions to noir are top rate. In addition to TOO LATE FOR TEARS he directed Liz Scott, Burt Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas in the terrific 1947 I WALK ALONE. He also directed John Payne’s best performance in the political drama THE BOSS in 1956. All these films are worth finding, and Haskin deserves to be remembered.

Seichō Matsumoto and Yoshitarō Nomura

Sometimes you trip over a masterpiece. ZERO FOCUS is a 1961 film noir from the Japanese director Yoshitaro Nomura. I came across it on HULU a couple of years ago never having heard of it before. The film, which concerns a young bride who goes looking for her new husband when he disappears one week after their wedding, is simply gorgeous. It's quiet but intense, much like its diminutive but insistent protagonist.

This isn't one of those crazy sixties Japanese Noirs (which are wonderful in a totally different way), it's more akin to Kurosawa's contemplative forays into noir around the same time (think HIGH AND LOW). Based on the book by the crime master Seicho Matsumoto, it's a labyrinth that deepens with every scene because it keeps getting deeper and deeper into its characters.

I love this picture. I loooove this picture. That love inspired me to seek out more films from Nomura and Matsumoto. The result is a new essay over at Criminal Element called The Dark Collaborations. Check it out and let me know what you think,

Kathleen Sharp On Margaret Millar

Faithful readers already know that I am unabashed in my admiration for the mystery novelist Margaret Millar. One of the great noir writers, she wrote intensely psychological novels that hummed with energy and crackled with sharp, witty prose. I've spent years browbeating friends into reading masterpieces like DO EVIL IN RETURN and THE IRON GATES. (Allow me to take this opportunity, my friends, to encourage you to find yourself a copy of one or both of these books.) Millar was prolific and incredibly diverse--though the latter quality, while admirable, is often cited by her admirers as the reason that she's not better known today. A lot of mystery writers, even great ones, tend to be one trick ponies, but Margaret Millar wasn't a "series detective" kind of gal. You truly do not know what you're going to get when you read one of her books. (DO EVIL IN RETURN and THE IRON GATES, for example, have little in common apart from sheer genius.) All you know is that a Millar novel will be good, maybe even great. Sentence for sentence, book for book, she was just about the best American crime writer of the postwar era.

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, the writer Kathleen Sharp has a fantastic piece on Millar's life and work. It is essential reading for Millar fanatics. (A reviewer once noted that "Millar doesn't attract fans; she creates addicts.") Sharp's essay is the single best thing I've read on Millar, and it makes me hope that she's working on a full length biography.

Read The Dangerous Housewife: Santa Barbara's Margaret Millar here.

PS. There is an error in Sharp's otherwise excellent piece that I should probably point out--I have feeling that other Millar fanatics will take me to task if I don't. She incorrectly describes THE IRON GATES as a gothic novel about abortion. It's neither a gothic novel nor is it about abortion.   

Killing Jesse

I'm a big fan of Andrew Dominik's 2007 THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Though it bombed at the box office and made a quiet transition to DVD, it remains one of the most original westerns I've ever seen. It's long, meditative and haunting, with undertones of sexual repression and violent jealousy embodied in the mesmerizing performances by Casey Affleck as Bob Ford and Brad Pitt as Jesse. I think it's pretty damn great.

Having said that, I will admit that it's not for every taste. It's less of a western, really, and more of an epic character study. When I saw it in the theater in 2007, most of the audience walked out. By the end it was just me and one other dude. (You and me, buddy--wherever you are.)

I say all this to say that recently I saw Sam Fuller's 1949 I SHOT JESSE JAMES for the first time. Though it is far more of a conventional western (at least by our standards today), I was surprised by how closely it mirrors the story of the Dominik film. Fuller's directorial debut, it doesn't have quite the snap and fire of his later work, but it does have a distinct point of view, a sympathy for the devil that we'd see throughout his career. One reason that the film isn't better is that it stars John Ireland as Bob Ford and Reed Hadley as Jesse. Ireland could be effective in supporting roles (think RED RIVER) but he was pretty bland as a leading man. (This lack of charisma is ironic given Ireland's offscreen reputation as one of Hollywood's most nortious skirtchasers.) As for Hadley, he was better known as a voiceover man. He did a lot of the booming Voice Of Authority reads that you hear at the beginning of docu-noirs. Seeing him here, it's no surprise that he wasn't more often employed onscreen.

Still, I SHOT JESSE JAMES makes for interesting lesson in how a story is shaped and molded by style and performance. It's like listening to an earlier version of a favorite tune.

Preaching to the Damned: Flannery O'Connor's Universe of Sinners

I have a framed picture of Flannery O’Connor on my wall at home. It’s a nice black and white close-up shot of Flannery smiling and looking off to the right. She’s wearing what looks to be a black dress. She has on horned-rimmed glasses and her teeth are a little crooked. She looks not unlike a middle school math teacher, the one you didn’t like. If you know anything about O’Connor’s work then the picture is a little surprising, in much the same what the yearbook photo of that same math teacher was always a little jarring: who knew she ever smiled?

Despite their humor, one might not guess from O’Connor’s stories that she ever smiled. There’s a hard edge to the humor in an O’Connor story, and how could it not be sharp when her stories deal with an unceasing parade of freaks, psychopaths, cripples, fanatics and wholly unsympathetic mother figures? Understand that I don’t mean any of this as a criticism. That geek show quality is what you should be looking for when you curl up with an O’Connor story for the night. If you like her, you’ll keep coming back to the well. If you don’t like her, one drink will probably do you for life.

I first discovered O’Connor in a creative writing class (isn’t it odd how we talk about our "discovery" of writers, as if they’re continents to be searched out, stumbled onto and explored for their riches?). The class had been assigned to read some other story, but I got the page numbers confused and read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by mistake.
 
How can one explain lightening striking? To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s comment on his discovery of Elvis: I read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and I knew I was never going to work a regular job again. I knew I wanted to be a writer. The discovery of certain writers sweeps away all the rational arguments against becoming a writer yourself. This was what O’Connor meant to me. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” dealt with the murder of a small family at the hands of a gang of thieves led by a religiously tormented philosopher/psychopath called the Misfit. I can’t say I understood O’Connor at the time, and, for that matter, I can’t say I understand her now. Greatness tends to inspire the desire to know and explain while robbing us of the ability. What matters, however, is not my understanding of the complex (and, sometimes, contrived) layers in O’Connor’s work. What matters is that O’Connor was the first writer I ever read whose vision of the world—religious, tormented, flawed—was skewed rather close to my own. It wasn’t the gun in the Misfit’s hand that made the story interesting for me, it was the thoughts in his head, the doubts about life and death and the haunting assertion that Jesus had achieved victory over both.

The irony, of course, is that O’Connor was a Catholic and her stories were suffused with her Catholicism. I was still a fundamentalist Southern Baptist when I discovered her, and yet it seemed to me that O’Connor was somewhat Baptist, even fundamentalist, in her worldview. She imagined a world in which an old woman can find grace as three bullets are fired into her scrawny chest. And what can I say but that this somehow appealed to me. I’m not advocating the shooting of old women, of course, not even for evangelical purposes. No, I think old women—and young women, and little girls, and males of all ages—should probably be left unshot, ungored and unbeaten, even by agents of God’s will. O’Connor would doubtless consider me weak. But what appealed to me in her work was not so much the violence unbelievers and backsliders had to endure, as much as it was the spiritual landscape they were made to transverse. In O’Connor’s world no one laughs off matters of faith for very long. Part of the virtue of her fiction is that she saw everyone as essentially corrupt. There are no paragons of virtue—no dewy eyed virgins or kind hearted old men from whom the wicked are forced to learn pious lessons. In O’Connor’s world, every man, woman and child is a sinner and the battle between the flesh and the spirit, between pride and grace, is never easy.

These reflections were inspired, at least in part, by the recent publication of A PRAYER JOURNAL, a collection of prayers and private religious reflections that O’Connor wrote between January 1946 and September 1947. She was only twenty years old when she began the journal, but in it her personality as a writer (acidic, pious, and fiercely intelligent) already seems fully formed. It’s an incredibly intimate look at her mind, a record of her most sacred meditations. We see her wrestling with her faith: “Dear Lord, please make me want you[…]There is a want but it is abstract and cold[…]” And we see her beseeching god for help: “Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work[...]Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.” In the best sense, the book shows her to be the Flannery O’Connor one would expect.

It’s impossible to read her prayer journal without reflecting on her fiction. The universe she created was full to bursting with preachers, fanatics and unbelievers. Unbelievers had it the worst, of course. I think of poor atheistic Sheppard in “The Lame Shall Enter First.” He takes in a boy preacher/thief as a good deed and pays dearly for his act of kindness. Didn’t that poor bastard know he was in O’Connor land? Could he possibly hope to survive the story unscathed? Not only was he an atheist, but he was a humanist, and Flannery O’Connor—at least in the godlike role of creator of her fictional universe—would not abide an optimistic belief in the human being. On some level, we were all Enoch Emery to Flannery. Enoch, the hero of “Enoch and the Gorilla,” (if "hero" is not too ironic a term for the main character in an O’Connor story), is one of her finest creations, an idiot obsessed with a man in a gorilla suit outside a movie theater. The story works as a dark comedy, but O’Connor’s critique of the theory of evolution, her critique of the idea that humanity could possibly have improved, is scathing. It’s damn near scalding. The story is one of her masterpieces (and it works even better as a segment in her novel WISE BLOOD), but it really is ripe with a contempt for humanity.

Oh, but I’m possibly making it sound as if I don’t like O’Connor, as if she’s some drag. She’s not. Few writers are as darkly funny, as quick to pop every imaginable pretension in the service of truth, and few writers are as interesting. As Harold Bloom once pointed out about her less than charitable view of the human race, you simply have to accept that O’Connor sees you as one of the damned, and then you can enjoy her. Another way to put this is that you can savor O’Connor’s talent for constantly pointing out the absurdity and hypocrisy of others as long as you’re aware that she wouldn’t cut you any slack, either.

What does it say about her that you have to make that bargain? The woman herself is lost to the fiction she created. O’Connor’s personality wasn’t nearly as large as her fiction. “There won’t be any biographies of me,” she once claimed “because lives spent between the house and the chicken yard don’t make for exciting copy.” She seems to retreat to the back of the room and stare at us over her glasses, muttering under her breath about hell and sin and God’s terrible grace. Despite the admirable biographical work that’s been published, what she was actually like remains cloaked in time, that great devourer of all but a few personalities.

What we have left are her stories, their perfect construction, their craftsmanlike prose (O’Connor wrote the cleanest sentences in the business), and their humor. And, every so often, their humanity. When you read something like “Good Country People” you can’t help but feel sorry for Hulga, the one-legged atheist. Her seduction by a Bible-selling nihilist named Manly Pointer is viewed by the author as a rightful comeuppance, but Hulga is a sad figure nevertheless.

The most striking element of the story for me is the scene where Hulga and Manly Pointer are in the barn. They’ve retreated there for a little good, old fashioned sinning. But when they kiss there’s a curious disconnect. There’s nothing erotic about it. In fact, I can’t think of a single erotic moment in any of O’Connor’s work. For that matter, I can’t think of a single moment of unfettered tenderness in O’Connor’s fiction. You read her work and it’s possible to ask yourself: did Flannery O’Connor ever kiss a boy? There’s nothing in “Good Country People” to indicate the author ever snuck out to the barn for some sweaty necking. In fact, there’s nothing in her work as a whole which would indicate O’Connor ever regarded physical interaction with anything other than suspicion. In A PRAYER JOURNAL, she writes disdainfully of sex and only a slightly less disdainfully of romance. “Man’s desire for God is bedded in his unconscious and seeks to satisfy itself in the physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after.” For O’Connor, sex seemed nothing more than a temptation to be avoided. (The funniest lines in her prayer journal: “Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.”) To judge by her fiction, her revulsion at  the natural world only grew stronger once she became ill with the lupus that would claim her life when she was thirty-nine.

When a reader engages with her fiction, one is in the company of an imagination shaped, at least in part, by religious fanaticism. That’s not a negative judgment. O’Connor possibly would not be as great a writer if not for that fanaticism. Her imagination is, after all, twisted. All I know of how she saw the world is how she wrote about it, and she wrote about it like it was a carnival of freaks.

It’s telling, perhaps, that her most overtly sexual story is a) called “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” and b) climaxes in a sad, scary scene with an intersex person used as a freak show hermaphrodite. Sex in her work always seems like a strange aberration, a disruption of the natural world rather than a part of it. Perhaps to the author it was. At one point in A PRAYER JOURNAL she records, “The desires of the flesh have been taken away from me. For how long I don’t know, but I hope forever. It is a great peace to be rid of them.” We can’t know how long her peaceful reprieve lasted, but for the remainder of her life her intellectual and emotional relationship to the desires of the flesh never seemed less than adversarial.

The publication of her prayer journal is a fascinating look inside the mind of a young writer who prayed, “I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.” At the very least, this prayer was answered.  

As 2013 Draws To A Close...

Well, I've been away a few weeks visiting family and friends, but I'm back in Chicago and getting down to work on a number of projects.

All in all, I've had a pretty great year. SAINT HOMICIDE marks the third book I've had published in three years. I couldn't have planned that, but I'm thrilled that it worked out that way. 

I owe a sincere thanks to everyone who bought HELL ON CHURCH STREET, THE POSTHUMOUS MAN, and SAINT HOMICIDE. A writer's ulitmate goal (beyond paying the bills) is to be read by a reader who understands and appreciates the work. I've been incredibly fortunate in this regard. Many people have written to let me know that they liked one book or another, and it never ceases to thrill me. Thank you.



 

Helen Holmes and the First Female Action Heroes

I have a couple of new pieces out right now about the heroines of the silent movie serials of the 1910s. I'm excited to have them out, because these performers were an amazing group of women who created characters that deserved to be remembered.

In the new issue of MENTAL FLOSS you can find my profile of the fearless Helen Holmes. She wasn't the first or the biggest of the serial queens, but for my money she was the most radical. In the years before women got the vote, Helen produced an image of a strong working-class woman who could rise to any challenge. The issue is available on newsstands and better bookstores now. The article is called "The Girl At The Switch" and is located on page 32. 

Over at Tor.com you can find my overview of the silent serial queens. I talk about Holmes along with Helen Gibson, Ruth Roland, Mary Fuller, and Pearl White. You can find that here.