Movie Review: Too Late For Tears (1949)

Also Known As: Killer Bait  

Genre: Crime Noir  

Director: Byron Haskin  

Starring: Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea, Arthur Kennedy, Don DeFore, Kristine Miller  

Running Time: 100 minutes  

Synopsis: Married couple Alan and Jane Palmer (Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott) stumble onto a bag full of ill-gotten but untraceable cash. He wants to immediately contact the police, but she believes this is their big opportunity to be rich, and convinces him to wait one week. They store the bag at a train station, but Jane anyway embarks on a spending spree. With Alan still insisting they need to do the right thing, Jane spots an opportunity to achieve her dreams when criminal Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) shows up to demand his money.

What Works Well: This is an unpredictable noir exploring emotions tested by unexpected wealth. Jane Palmer is an unforgettable greed-driven force of evil, and Lizabeth Scott's searing performance brings an epic femme fatale to life. Jane has never met a man she cannot manipulate, and dark references to her first marriage suggest she has been playing this game for a long time. In Roy Huggins' screenplay (based on his own book), every role surrounding her matters, and the small but effective cast shines with intensity. Alan's sister Kathy (Kristine Miller) and his wartime buddy Don (Don DeFore) gain prominence as the twisty machinations unfold.

What Does Not Work As Well: Some of the plot details are clunkily convenient.

Conclusion: But not too late for murder, seduction, and multiple layers of subterfuge.



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Movie Review: Easy Living (1949)

A sports drama, Easy Living is a grim story about the thin line between glamour and obscurity on and off the field.

Pete Wilson (Victor Mature) is the star quarterback of the Chiefs professional football team. Marketed as "King Football", he is the league's MVP and the face of the franchise. Pete is married to the ambitious Liza (Lizabeth Scott), who wants to capitalize on her status to launch an interior design business. She cozies up to wealthy businessman Howard Vollmer (Art Baker) as a potential client.

After feeling unwell, Pete is privately diagnosed with a heart condition. Fearful this could spell the end of his career, he keeps his ailment a secret from both Liza and the team's ruthless owner Lenahan (Lloyd Nolan). Meanwhile Lenahan's secretary and widowed daughter-in-law Anne (Lucille Ball) harbours a secret crush on Pete. After being passed-up for a coaching role and with his on-field performances in decline, Pete is confronted with the real possibility of losing everything.

One of the earliest movies set in the world of professional football, Easy Living features a complex, multi-faceted narrative. A relatively low-budget production from RKO Pictures clocking in at just 77 minutes, the adaptation of Irwin Shaw's Education Of The Heart overachieves with a story about the lure of social status, the fragile careers of elite athletes, and the difficult trade-offs between health and glory.

Easy Living offers a rare peek into the early era of high-stakes professional sports. Train and bus rides for the players, finances dominating decisions, slipshod medical oversight, and repeated assertions this is a bushiness like any other, players pumped into stars or dumped onto the scrapheap as best befits the bottom line. As a star attraction Pete thrives in this milieu; Liza is much less interested, preferring to spend her evenings at posh parties schmoozing with the literati.

Director Jacques Tourneur, working from Charles Schnee's compact script, packs in people and incidents around the central couple. The film buzzes with secondary characters, including Pete's best friend and teammate Tim (Sonny Tufts) and his grounded wife Penny (Miss Jeff Donnell), as well as reporters, marketing agents, coaches, old timers, and a whole ecosystem of social climbers gathered around affluent sleazeball Vollmer. 

Most poignant is the subplot featuring Holloran (Gordon Jones), an aging lineman now past his best-by date and about to be unceremoniously dumped by the team, providing Pete with an unwanted preview of his potential fate. Meanwhile, up-and-coming model Billy Duane (June Bright) decorates Liza's glitzy social circle, but she too will wave an unexpected caution flag. 

The intertwined threads of risk and ambition reside at the heart of the film, Pete and Liza mostly in love with the idea of who they are but unable to imagine what their union means if the fundamentals change. Pete is an on-field icon but off the field he is unsure how to handle failing health and a showcase marriage. Liza is undoubtedly heartless in her exploitation of only one acceptable image of Pete, but her ambition is conjoined with villainy, her pursuit of Vollmer the personification of greed's outer limits. 

While Liza earns any pot-holes created by her single-purposed exploitive agenda, her arc ends with exceptionally crude treatment. Despite that foul, Easy Living scores an unlikely touchdown.

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Movie Review: Pitfall (1948)

A tense drama with noirish elements, Pitfall uncovers the dangers that seep to the surface when the thrill of an affair clouds better judgement.

In Los Angeles, John Forbes (Dick Powell) is an mid-level manager with the Olympic Mutual Insurance Company. Married to Sue (Jane Wyatt) and father to young son Tommy, John is going through a mid-life crisis, feeling stale in his life, marriage and career. At the office, private detective MacDonald (Raymond Burr) reports to John that he has uncovered Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) as the recipient of gifts paid for by the convict Smiley (Byron Barr) with ill-gotten money insured by Olympic. MacDonald also does not hide the fact that he found Mona to be stunningly attractive.

John sets off to meet Mona and recover as many of the gifts as possible. He is immediately attracted to her vulnerability and they embark on a brief affair. But MacDonald wants Mona for himself, and from behind bars Smiley is seething with jealousy. John's stray impulses set off a chain of events that will threaten his career and result in unexpected violence.

Directed by André De Toth, Pitfall carries the insurance-and-crime echoes of Double Indemnity and foreshadows the straying-man-ruins-life lessons of Fatal Attraction, but is not quite as sharp as either of these two classics. Pitfall builds a decent mood, boasts a good cast in fine form, and is packaged into a compact 86 minutes. But the crime elements take a long time to grab hold, and are focused within the obtuse character of the private detective MacDonald.

The film's black and white cinematography and crime elements suggest some noir-light aesthetics. But De Toth does not go out of his way to engage in the noir style, nor does the plot forcefully move in a noir direction. Pitfall is more of a morality tale about the dangers of wandering away from the comforts of family, with defined villains and few motivational ambiguities.

John Forbes is the prototypical middle class man, well established in his career with a loving wife and cute kid. And yet he has hit the middle age wall where he is deeply resentful of his life, using sarcasm as a crutch, questioning what it all means and aching for the carefree freedom of youth. In short, a perfect candidate for the lure of a quick affair, and he stumbles into Mona's apartment fully vulnerable to her sob story.

But alluring as she is, John does not belong in the sordid world occupied by the likes of Mona, MacDonald and Smiley, and his dive into emotional entanglements within their gutter creates ripples that culminate in a series of crimes. MacDonald's obsession is the main catalyst for evil deeds, but John's involvement makes a bad situation much worse.

Dick Powell is dependable and well suited to the role of bland insurance man. But Lizabeth Scott and Raymond Burr deliver the two most memorable performances. Scott is perfect as the attractive victim with the darkness of a misdirected life swirling behind her eyes. Burr as MacDonald is simply imposing in a suit about three sizes too big, a self-satisfied presence trying to force the world to bend to his will, consequences be damned. Jane Wyatt's role as Sue Forbes grows in importance as the story progresses, and Wyatt rises up to the challenge of the pivotal role Sue ultimately gets to play in deciding John's fate.

Pitfall may not always shine with new ideas or blazing execution, but it does deliver a solid cautionary tale about the hazards of succumbing to wayward impulses.

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Movie Review: Dead Reckoning (1947)

A film noir constructed out of mostly recycled content, Dead Reckoning boasts Humphrey Bogart in his prime, but otherwise suffers from a stiff female lead and a plot that convolutes to distraction.

Buddies Captain "Rip" Murdock (Bogart) and Sergeant Johnny Drake (William Prince) finish their World War Two duty on a high, with both nominated for medals. But Johnny seems intent on shunning the limelight, and on the way to the Washington DC ceremonies, he abandons the train and disappears. Stunned, Rip follows his friend to his hometown of Gulf City, where he discovers that Drake's real name was Joseph Preston, and that just before the war he was accused of murdering a man called Chandler in a dispute over Chandler's wife Coral (Lizabeth Scott), a local beauty.

Preston's badly charred body soon turns up at the morgue, reportedly a victim of a car crash. At a nightclub owned by shady businessman Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky), Rip tracks down bartender Louis Ord (George Chandler), who was a witness to the Chandler murder, and also meets Coral. Sparks immediately fly between Rip and Coral, although she seems eager to lose a lot of money at Martinelli's illegal casino. Before Rip can properly talk to Louis, Martinelli and his henchman Krause (Marvin Miller) interfere, framing Rip for murder, and unleashing Lieutenant Kincaid (Charles Cane) onto his tail. Rip has to extricate himself from a murder rap and untangle the web between Coral and Martinelli to try and clear the name of his wartime friend.

There are a few too many borrowed elements from other Bogart movies residing within Dead Reckoning. The intentional loss at a casino is lifted straight from The Big Sleep (1946), and the determination of Bogart's character to make someone pay for the murder of his friend, no matter the personal cost, is swiped from The Maltese Falcon (1941), to the point of almost repeating the same dialogue. Lizabeth Scott herself bears a remarkable resemblance to Lauren Bacall, except that Scott lacks the silky fluidity, replacing it instead with sometimes awkward motions and bland, if husky, line delivery.

But within the overall context of a derivative script, director John Cromwell does a decent job of assembling a competent and brisk film noir. Dead Reckoning hits the ground running, and maintains a determined pace that helps to overcome the shortcomings in originality. The story is told mostly in flashback, with Rip already in trouble from the first frame, bruised and on the run from the cops. He ducks into a church and finds a military chaplain, who becomes a witness to the tale. From there the other characters are quickly introduced, a typical assortment of innocent victims, slick manipulators, snarly goons, flat-footed police officers, and at the centre an alluring femme fatale who may be much more than what she seems.

The film plugs into the energy of an engaged Bogart delivering a smooth performance. Rip Murdock is not a hard boiled private detective and lacks the indestructible snarkiness of a Sam Spade, and this vulnerability allows Bogart to play with character missteps as Rip believably falls hard for Coral's charms, and more than once gets outsmarted by Martinelli.

The plot does get confusing towards the end, too many twists introduced in a stack without enough time for proper digestion, as the story rushes to lay all the blame under one bed. Dead Reckoning plays with a tired deck, but with Bogart in charge of dealing, the film still delivers a decent hand.

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