Lighting Greed and Guilt in Film Noir

Too Late for Tears

As the title of the 1948 film noir suggests, Too Late for Tears the unrepentant pursuit of ill-gotten wealth by one nobody named Jane. Jane and Alan and middle-class Americans; Alan is okay with that—Jane is not. She chafes at the condescension of her wealthier peers, and the opening sequence of the film centers on her griping about having to spend another evening with one of their rich friends. The sequence is set on the open road, as Jane and Alan head to a party. Jane becomes so filled with anxiety and resentment that she tries to force Alan to turn back. In doing so, she causes Alan to swerve and the lights of the car flicker on and off. As fate would have it, there just so happens to be another car pulled off to the side of the road waiting for exactly such a signal. A bag of hush money is tossed out the window into the backseat of Jane and Alan’s car. Thus begins Jane’s descent into money-fueled madness and murder. Too Late for Tears is a good example of film noir because at its heart it is about the decaying underbelly of modern America—a story about a seemingly normal housewife who becomes a killer due to her greed. Apart from its story and moral themes, however, the film uses all the stylistic elements, narrative patterns, and character development (no arc for—it’s just straight down for her) typical of the genre. The opening sequence foregrounds the central conflict of the film: Jane’s greed and desire (spontaneous, impulsive and impetuous) is set in opposition to the basic human decency represented initially by her husband Alan; he attempts to restore some sanity and order at the end of the sequence (“Slow down, I’ll take the wheel”), but it is already too late for her: like Lady Macbeth, she has set her eyes on riding Dame Fortune and the hush-money gift bag straight to the top and nothing will get in the way of her resolve—not even a little murder of decency along the way.

The visual style of Too Later for Tears is illustrative of noir’s tendency to bask in shadows. Shadowy scenes, with strips of light drawing the viewer’s attention to a pair of eyes or a hand on a gun like some living chiaroscuro effect on film, proliferate in noir. They can be found in films like Notorious, The Third Man, The Big Sleep, and dozens upon dozens of others. Low-key lighting is “key” to understanding film noir, as Place and Peterson point out.[footnoteRef:1] High contrast sets the mood and tone of the story: film noir looks steadily at the tension, separation, and divide between light and darkness—the visual representation of the moral quandary found in human nature, so often the subject of history’s moral philosophers. [1: Place, Janey A., and Lowell S. Peterson. \\\\\\\"Some visual motifs of film noir.\\\\\\\" Film Comment 10, no. 1 (1974): 30.]

Fritz Lang introduced the crazy camera upward tilt in M that Kubrick would use later in The Shining to suggest the superiority of Jack’s insanity as he talks to his wife through the bathroom door and tells her about how he is going to bash her brains in. Lang uses it to illustrate the unyielding slightly sadistic determination of the detective on the case of the pedophilic killer. Too Late for Tears’ opening sequence does not have any such crazy tilts—but it does adhere visually to one of the all-time great noir framing jobs: the opening shot is of the sedan that will be making the bag drop as it winds along a road in the hills high above L.A. The city is far below, lit up perfectly in the night, and the non-diegetic sound of the score plays ominously as the sedan proceeds right to left across the screen, suggesting that something horrible lies up ahead that will change the lives of everyone the viewer is about to meet. The city lights far below twinkle like a promise of wealth and attraction, foreshadowing the trap (the bag of money) that will kick off the plot of the film. The sedan stops at mile marker 3.5, revealed as a light shines on it, then again hidden in shadow, darkness, and mystery.

The score is very important in this opening shot as it sets the dark, dramatic mood. The high angle wide camera shot, too, is important, as it shows how isolated and set apart from the rest of society Jane and Alan (and the bag man) are. After all, it is Jane’s chief complaint that she cannot be as rich as her friends, that they have to be looked down on. Here, the viewer finds them in a range of hills where they might look down on everyone else in the city as they head higher. The only problem is that they are moving precipitously and even dangerously: if in moral terms the right hand represents the good, and the left hand represents the bad, the visual movement of the sedan from right to left across the screen represents movement into imminent danger. The headlights, small against the darkened backdrop and cliff, suggest that someone is in peril already even if he or she doesn’t know it. The mysterious man parks on the side of the road, checks his watch, and waits.

The sequence cuts to a second car—Jane and Alan’s convertible—coming from the opposite direction, left to right across the screen. The shot nestles the convertible more comfortably against a backdrop of solid growth—a tall tree in the foreground, the slope of a hill in the background. A match-on-action cut moves the viewer from a wide angle long shot of the couple’s sedan as it takes the bend in the road to a more intimate shot of the couple in close-up as they sit together, Alan behind the wheel, Jane tensely at his side in the passenger’s seat. “You’re awfully quiet tonight,” he says indicating that something is wrong. The non-diegetic sound of the score that has been slowly building to a crescendo now drops quiet without reaching its climax and the viewer is dropped into the laps of this couple and introduced to Jane’s troubles: “I’ve been trying to think of just the right way to ask you to turn around and go back.” This bit of diegetic sound—dialogue from the movie—supported by the sound of the car humming subtly along the road (and nothing else—no non-diegetic sounds to give added effect—just the lonely sound of rubber against pavement) conveys a core concept of film noir—the need for recognizing danger in isolation, for going back, a u-turn, a turnabout that will allow one to escape the hazard lying up ahead and fly back into safety. Jane seems to sense it most because she is aware of her own struggles, sins, and insecurity. Alan is aloof—and it will end up costing him dearly. He begs off: turn back? “On this road? No…can’t do it, sweetie.”

Jane eventually breaks and tries to take control of the car and Alan snaps, “What are you trying to do, send us off the edge?” The question is ironic because she is actually trying to keep them from going off the edge. He does not realize the moral danger he is in—she does. He won’t listen, and now the bag is tossed into the car—like Macbeth’s witches tossing a promise of kingship into Macbeth’s mind at the start of that most noir-ish of Shakespeare’s plays. Once Jane and Alan inspect the bag, diegetic and non-diegetic sound combine with the onscreen reaction of Jane’s face to drive home the devilishness of the moment. The viewer hears the bag clasps popping open and the score dramatically soft but riveting pops with a sudden halt as Jane’s eyes go big and a hush is felt over the scene. Danger has arrived. Jane seemed to have sensed it intuitively and tried to avoid it—but now her eyes signal that she is caught and caught bad. Alan’s face is hidden in shadow—only the cusp of his nose and the brim of his hat catches any light (high and to the side) as he looks down at the bag. All attention is on Jane’s face and her eager, greedy eyes twisting her soul into something dark as Alan’s silhouette.

One of the hallmarks of film noir is the ambiguity about where the line between good and evil is actually drawn: it tends to be blurred and unclear because the heroes of the genre are so often riddled with imperfections themselves and the villains are given a touch of humanity, too (“He was some kind of man” is the famous penultimate closing line of ambiguous judgment delivered regarding Orson Welle’s fat slob of a corrupt detective in Touch of Evil). Sam Spade has a code of honor but it is never all too clear as he at times appears to play both sides of the divide in The Maltese Falcon to get what he wants. “What did I want?” is the pensive, introspective query of Tom in the Coen Brother’s neo-noir classic Miller’s Crossing. And Double Indemnity represents another kind of cautionary tale that suggests the line between good and evil runs right through the heart of every ordinary human being and one ought to be careful about crossing it because bad things happen when one does. Too Late for Tears fits right into the genre along these parameters. It does not initially seem to want to dwell too long in the territory of moral ambiguity so often found in films of the genre. Instead, the opening sequence seems to indicate a set-up of a basic good vs. evil paradigm, with Alan being Good and Jane (and money) being Evil. The opening sequence sets up what looks like a straight-to-the-point approach of what the slippery slope of immorality is capable of doing to one’s life: it is soon thereafter hinted, for instance, that Jane’s greed has already put one husband in the ground (suicide, at least that is what the records say), and it just as quickly finds her putting a bullet in Alan, who is just the first (or second) in a trail of bodies she leaves behind as she descends into hell (figuratively represented by her flight from a hotel balcony straight into death).

However, the film is not without its ambiguous hero, once the character of Don is introduced. With Alan out of the way and Danny chased off (then killed), the film needs another masculine counterpoint to Jane’s version of the femme fatale—and Don is it. The audience is unsure of his actual identity and his actual motives, however. He makes up a story about being an old military friend of Alan’s—but this lie is quickly exposed by Jane. Nonetheless, he hits it off with Alan’s sister and continues to pursue Jane like some haunting phantom of justice. It is eventually revealed that Don is the brother of her first husband and that he thinks it was no suicide but rather murder that put an end to his brother’s life. Since he cannot get the American police to be of any help, he enlists the Mexicans, themselves a representation of something less than “civilized” in terms of modernity. Yet, as Paul Schrader notes, film noir is often focused on “post-war disillusionment”[footnoteRef:2]—so the idea makes sense that an alternate civilization needs to exist where the exercise of the law and justice can be found. That alternate civilization is Mexico—south of the border—seemingly unruly and shadowy, but where truth is at least still respected, unlike in post-war US where authorities don’t really seem to care much (at least about Don’s story). [2: Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Comment (1972), vol. 8 no. 1, 9.]

The film illustrates the basic components of film noir by following the typical outline of the genre: bad choices, murder, greed, guilt, judgment. Yet, it also complicates the basic components. For example, Jane is no ordinary femme fatale. Unlike Phyllis in Double Indemnity or Brigid in The Maltese Falcon, there is nothing really seductive about Jane. The opening sequence (much like the rest of the film) does not play up any seductive curves or seductive figure. Her face is somewhat more angular than soft and alluring. Even her name is boring: she is a plain Jane middle-class housewife. The real seductress in the film is the bag of money—as it is in Raimi’s neo-noir thriller A Simple Plan. Jane does convince Danny (the meant-to-be-recipient of the hush-money bag) to help her get rid of Alan’s body and hide the murder—but it is more about the lure of money and the force of her will than it is sexual seduction that gets Danny to go along. Sexuality tends to lurk like a snake in film noir, teasing intended victims with a promise of pleasure before it bites them in the neck. Sam Spade has to dance a potentially fatal dance with Brigid in order to achieve some victory in The Maltese Falcon. Marlowe is always dealing with some kind of sexy femme fatale in the Chandler films. Walter Neff is ensnared by the seductive Phyllis. But in Too Late for Tears, there is no real seductive powers on the part of Jane. It is the bag of money that seduces—and Jane yields to the seduction rather immediately.