Too Late for Tears: A Film Noir Analysis

Introduction: Greed and the Noir Formula

As the title of the 1948 film suggests, Too Late for Tears chronicles the unrepentant pursuit of ill-gotten wealth by a nobody named Jane. Jane and Alan are middle-class Americans; Alan is content 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, another car is 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 strong 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, the film uses all the stylistic elements, narrative patterns, and character development typical of the genre. The opening sequence foregrounds the central conflict: 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 murder.

Visual Style and the Chiaroscuro Effect

The visual style of Too Late 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 of others. Low-key lighting is "key" to understanding film noir, as Place and Peterson point out.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.

Fritz Lang introduced the unsettling upward camera tilt in M that Kubrick would later use in The Shining to suggest the superiority of Jack's insanity as he speaks to his wife through the bathroom door. Lang uses it to illustrate the unyielding, slightly sadistic determination of the detective pursuing the pedophilic killer. Too Late for Tears' opening sequence does not employ such extreme tilts — but it does adhere visually to one of the great noir framing devices: the opening shot is of the sedan making the bag drop as it winds along a road in the hills high above Los Angeles. The city is far below, lit up perfectly in the night, and the non-diegetic score plays ominously as the sedan proceeds right to left across the screen, suggesting that something horrible lies 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. The sedan stops at mile marker 3.5, briefly revealed as a light shines on it, then hidden again in shadow, darkness, and mystery.

The Opening Sequence: Sound, Framing, and Foreshadowing

The score is critically important in this opening shot, as it sets the dark, dramatic mood. The high-angle wide camera shot is equally significant: it shows how isolated and set apart from the rest of society Jane, Alan, and the bag man are. After all, Jane's chief complaint is that she cannot be as rich as her friends, that she and Alan are looked down upon. Here, the viewer finds them in a range of hills from which they might look down on everyone else in the city as they head higher. The only problem is that they are moving precipitously and dangerously. If in moral terms the right hand represents good and the left hand represents 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 already in peril even if he or she does not 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, moving 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 close-up of the couple as they sit together, Alan behind the wheel and Jane tensely at his side. "You're awfully quiet tonight," he says, indicating that something is wrong. The non-diegetic 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 dialogue, supported by the sound of the car humming subtly along the road — no non-diegetic sounds for added effect, just the lonely sound of rubber against pavement — conveys a core concept of film noir: the need to recognize danger in isolation, to turn back before it is too late. Jane seems to sense the peril most because she is aware of her own struggles, sins, and insecurity. Alan is aloof, and it will end up costing him dearly. He brushes her off: turn back? "On this road? No — can't do it, sweetie."

Jane eventually breaks and tries to take control of the car. 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 casting 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 halts as Jane's eyes go wide and a hush falls 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 badly. Alan's face is hidden in shadow — only the cusp of his nose and the brim of his hat catching 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 alongside Alan's silhouette.

Bibliography

Place, Janey A., and Lowell S. Peterson. "Some visual motifs of film noir." Film Comment 10, no. 1 (1974): 30.

Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Comment 8, no. 1 (1972): 9.

Thomas, Deborah. "How Hollywood deals with the deviant male." The Movie Book of Film Noir (1992): 59–70.