MAN IN THE VAULT. RKO Radio Pictures, 1956. William Campbell, Karen Sharpe, Anita Ekberg, Berry Kroger, Paul Fix, James Seay, Mike Mazurki, Robert Keys, Nancy Duke, Gonzalez Gonzalez, Vivianne Lloyd. Screenplay by Burt Kennedy, based on the novel The Lock and the Key by Frank Gruber. Director: Andrew V. McLaglen.

   I’m willing to bet that if you recognize more than two or three of the actors and actresses in this 1950s style crime movie, you’re somebody who looks up somebody on IMBD at least once a day. Casual movie viewers will know only one, and she’s barely in the movie, so if that’s why you might ever pick out this movie to see on DVD, say, you’re going to be out of luck.

   The star is William Campbell, and I’ll see if I can’t find a good photo of him. He plays a apprentice locksmith named Tony Dancer in the movie, and he’s hired by a gangster to help pull off a job for him. But getting back to Campbell, I learned a new word today:

   Quiff: “Popularized mostly by 50s rockabillys, a quiff is basically a forelock that is longer than the rest of one’s hair on top, and is usually combed upwards (and back), or to the side, or made to hang over the forehead. Depending on the wearers hair type a spot of gel or grease may be in order. Very stylish & manly. If done properly.”

   Campbell also looks something like Tony Curtis, and he’s had something like 80 appearances in movies and TV, the last one in 1996, and I don’t believe I’ve ever noticed him in any one of them. Whether that’s my fault or the movies he’s been in, you’d have to go to IMDB and look him up.

   The movie’s in black and white, and I’ve never seen it before. All of these years I thought this was one of those grand caper movies, in which a gang of crooks works out a precisely laid out plan to rob a bank. Not so. All Tony Dancer has to do is get inside the room where the safety deposit boxes are, make a key to get into one of the boxes, return and remove the contents.

   A little sweat on the brow, hoping the bank teller at the door doesn’t turn around, and there’s nothing to it. Problem is, Tony Dancer isn’t really crooked, but on the other hand he’s fallen for one of the girls (Karen Sharpe) he meets at a party thrown by the gangster (Berry Kroger), and all kind of complications ensue.

   Being filmed in various parts of 1950s Los Angeles is a plus, but bad pacing and a story line that moves in fits and starts are not. It’s a good example of what it is, though, a 1950s crime film – one not particularly noirish in theme, but filmed with the same amount of money in the till to begin with – that I somehow found both appealing and entertaining.

OFF THE RECORD. Warner Brothers, 1939. Pat O’Brien, Joan Blondell, Bobby Jordan, Alan Baxter, Morgan Conway. Director: James Flood.

   Joan Blondell plays a reporter (Jane Morgan) in this movie, and so does Pat O’Brien, but he’s the kind of guy (named “Breezy”) who thinks women should stay at home and be married (in this case to him) rather than have a career, especially writing for the same newspaper.

   To show him, Jane finds a story on her own – successfully, too, as it produces several headlines and puts a punk hoodlum into prison and his young brother (Bobby Jordan) into reform school. The big boss, though, as big bosses have a way of doing, manages to stay on the outside.

   Feeling guilty about the boy in reform school, Jane persuades Breezy to adopt young Mickey. And of course to do that, they also have to get married, although Breezy is the last to know that’s the reason — and the first to object when he finds out.

   The first third of this 60-minute movie is in the same dark and gritty mode as many of the Warner Brothers gangster films being made around the same time, and so are the last 15 minutes or so. In between, if it’s not a comedy — young Mickey definitely does not want to be adopted – it is considerably lighter in fare than the rest of the film.

   Bobby Jordan made a career out of playing pseudo-delinquents and young toughs on the fringes of the law, including long stints with the Dead End Kids, East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys. In this one, at the age of only sixteen himself, he reminded me of none other than a young Lloyd Nolan, often wearing a felt hat, necktie and a suit jacket that looks a size or two too large for him and trying to look as grown-up as he could.

   But to my mind, Off the Record is Joan Blondell’s picture. She uses this film to show off her fine ability as a straight actress as well as a flair for wisecracking comedy. Although she’s largely forgotten today, both of these talents stood her well over a long career in movies and TV, which extended from her debut in 1930 to her death in 1979 at the age of 73.

ARSON, INC. Lippert Pictures, 1949. Robert Lowery, Anne Gwynne, Edward Brophy, Marcia Mae Jones, Douglas Fowley, Maude Eburne, Byron Foulger. Director: William Berke.

   If you recognize any of the names of the members of the cast above, you ought to make a fortune on any Quiz Show that focuses on the movie entertainment industry. If you were to gather that this was a low budget production, you’d be absolutely right. If more than a thousand dollars was spent in the making of this movie, I’d be surprised.

   And of course I’m exaggerating, but not by much. This is the last movie I’ve watched in a DVD set of Forgotten Noir (Volume One), not that it’s noir, only a Bargain Basement crime movie in black-and-white made in the 1940s, and therefore…? It has to be noir.

   Arson, Inc. begins as a semi-documentary about the fire-fighting business, then segues quickly into a story of an undercover member of the arson squad (Robert Lowrey) who’s on the trail of a gang whose specialty is burning down warehouses supposedly filled with furs.

   Along the way he meets a schoolteacher (Anne Gwynne) who along with her canny old grandmother (Maude Eburne) moonlights as a babysitter. She also soon becomes his girl friend, and by “she,” I do not mean the grandmother.

   Anne Gwynne is another in a long line of good-looking Hollywood actresses whose careers never got out of low, by which I mean B-movies like this one. A sizable role in House of Frankenstein (1944) may have been the height of her career.

   Likewise goes for good-looking Robert Lowrey, whose career was longer than his co-star, including stints as Bill Gray, Indian Commissioner, in Cowboy G-Men and as a semi-regular as Buss Courtney in Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats, not that I’m telling you out of past experience, mind you. I’m only repeating what I’ve been told on IMDB.

   And speaking of IMDB, those who’ve left comments there generally liked this movie one whole quantum leap more than I did.

   Any crime movie in which the gangsters and goons at a gangsters and goons late-night party stand around and sing “Little Brown Jug” does not stand much of a chance of getting a high rating from me.

   Don’t blame the actors and actresses, though. They’re all professionals, and to a man and woman, they all know what they’re doing. I tend not to blame the directors very much in movies like this either, as they had little control over the stories they were asked to film, and even less over the money they were allowed to spend. William Berke does a good job with what he has to work with.

SECONDS. Paramount, 1966. Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph, Will Geer, Jeff Corey, Richard Anderson, Frances Reid, Murray Hamilton. Based on the novel by David Ely. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Director: John Frankenheimer.

   There are moments in the movie, filmed in glorious black-and-white, that are among the creepiest — not the scariest, per se — but the get-under-your-skin or the into-your-mind-and-can’t-get-it-out kind of nightmares that haven’t been surpassed by any other film that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

   Basic scenario: a secret organization has discovered ways of changing your identity, if you’ve gotten tired and weary of the one have, into another.

   It takes a skilled medical staff, a large support system, and a lot of stuff you really don’t want to ask about — and voila! An aging banker (John Randolph) whose marriage has long ago had all its passion sucked out of it becomes someone who looks a lot like Rock Hudson.

   And if things don’t go well, don’t ask about that either.

   A lot of the credit for what makes this movie work as well as it does has to go to cinematographer James Wong Howe, who uses innovative lighting, extreme closeups, high angle shots and hand-held camera work to create a world of depressive darkness that’s infinitely capable of causing heartfelt, emotional screaming not so much verbally — although there is that, too — but on the inside, where it really counts.

   It’s what’s in our heads that makes who we are, no matter how well disguise our facades to the world, and the older you get, the more you’re aware of that, and the harder it is to get away from it.

   It’s not an entirely successful movie, though, and by taking a few days to think it over, I believe I know why, at least in part. Individual scenes are often small gems, but there’s no cohesion, not enough connective tissue between them.

   It’s not that there’s not enough back story, as I thought at first — the actors in this film are utterly perfect in their parts, and we can see from their faces alone who they are and why they are doing what they are doing — and also that they’re wrong, most of them, or evil without knowing that they are and convinced they’re doing good; or in case of others, that they’re making the right decisions, only to find out that perhaps they’re not.

   Sagging the most is the middle of the movie, the transition from opening scenes to end game that needs the most support and doesn’t quite get it, wherein Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson begins to discover, belatedly, that a new body is not enough, not even when he meets a good-looking neighbor on a lonely California beach (Salome Jens).

   A long wine-crushing festival with a commune of naked hippies is followed by an even longer cocktail party literally from hell, but neither packs a wallop as solid as, well, when Tony Wilson does try the impossible: to go home again.

   A foolish attempt, that. It can’t be done.

CIRCUS. Columbia, 2000. John Hannah, Famke Janssen, Brian Conley, Peter Stormare, Fred Ward, Eddie Izzard, Amanda Donohoe. Directed by Rob Walker.

   There’s plenty of split opinion to go around on this movie, but to get mine out of the way first, me, I liked it. For the most part, the dissenters fall into two camps: first, those who couldn’t follow the plot line and gave up, and secondly, those who found it inferior to a number of other similar movies of the British gangster persuasion that came out around the same time: Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, to name two.

   Not so coincidentally, both of these were directed by Guy Ritchie, and as to the latter objection, my opinion may be biased because I’ve yet to see either one.

   But as for the complicated twists and turns of the plot: I loved them! Compared to a movie like Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (reviewed here) in which the story line is straight as a string, with the mildest of zingers at the end, Circus is absolutely dynamite.

   One never knows (until the next scene) who is in cahoots with whom, and not even with a scorecard can you even tell which players are on which team.

   It would take several watchings before I’d feel totally confident that I’d have the story completely in my grasp, so that I could relay them on to you, and even then it might not even be possible. I’ll do my best, but I won’t go into detail, and of course you wouldn’t want me to anyway. (You’d hate me tomorrow if I did.)

   In any case, here goes: a con artist couple named Leo and Lilly (John Hannah and Famke Janssen) are planning one last final scam, but unknown to them a brutal crime lord named Bruno (Brian Conley) has plans of his own, targeting Leo with a blackmail scheme that’s built around hiring him as a hit man to kill a woman named Gloria (Amanda Donohue) who’s already on Leo’s team, or has Lilly been bending Bruno’s ear so that she’s really working for him, or did I just make that up? In the meantime Leo’s bookie Troy (Eddie Izzard) is after him for some bad bets that he made and he wants to get paid, and can Leo actually trust Lilly? Bruno’s accountant Julius (Peter Stormare) is in on the blackmail scheme, but is he working for Bruno, for Leo, for Lilly, or himself, or is he only a poor schnook who’s being taken advantage of by all three? (Is Gloria really his wife, or is she only another pawn, or does she have a mind of her own?)

   Once again, please keep in mind that some or all of the above is true. Would I lie to you? Yes, I would.

   A complicated story like this could be a huge flop easily if the actors involved weren’t involved, and believe me, they are. No phoned-in roles in this movie. John Hannah you might remember as the later Inspector Rebus in that series, and Famke Janssen is even more memorable as Jean Gray in the “X-Men” extravaganzas. They make a terrific pair, whether working together in this movie, or not, when they are even better.

DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND. Columbia, 1966. James Coburn, Camilla Sparv, Robert Webber, Aldo Ray, Nina Wayne, Rose Marie, with Harrison Ford (uncredited). Screenwriter-director: Bernard Girard.

   After watching several movies recently in black-and-white, it was quite a pleasure to see one in color, especially one in which the choice of colors used was so expertly done, along with a wide variety of clever camera shots and angles.

   I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that a sizable chunk of the credit goes to cinematographer Lionel Lindon, who received an Oscar for Around the World in Eighty Days and was nominated two other times. Not a shabby resume.

   Other than the camera work, though, I really have to apologize that I can find little else in this movie that’s worthy of a recommendation to you. It’s a bank caper story, one that takes place at the same time a Russian bigwig is landing at the L.A. airport, using up all of the LAPD’s manpower, but the story makes very use of that, nor any of the other plot devices I kept making up in my head as I was watching along.

   The story’s disjointed, there’s no characterization — save (in a way) for the criminal mastermind himself, Eli Kotch, played by James Coburn, and I’ll return to him in a minute — and believe it or not, there’s no suspense, not a single iota of excitement. Not once, not ever.

   Personally, I find James Coburn as an actor to be brashly if not insufferably smug and self-centered. Perhaps not in all of his films, but in Dead Heat, he turns up the arrogance a notch or two. Don’t get me wrong, I can deal with it if the story’s got my attention, but in this movie, it’s James Coburn you get, or nothing at all.

   Maybe I’m just jealous? In this movie, at least, all he has to do is smile, and women simply fall in love (and into bed) with him. Good-looking, most of them — you needn’t ask. Poor Camilla Sparv, as one of his victims, who goes so far as to marry him and unwittingly aid his cause — that of robbing a bank, in case it’s slipped your mind.

   When she’s of no further use to him, she’s gone, all but out of mind and forgotten. And there’s where he makes his first (and only) mistake. Perhaps not in the way you might expect — nor me, either, since as a payoff, when it finally came, I threw up my hands and said, that’s it??

   As for Harrison Ford, and his first film appearance. Blink, and you’ll miss him. I did.

A TOUCH OF LARCENY. Paramount-UK, 1959. James Mason, Vera Miles, George Sanders, Harry Andrews, Robert Flemyng, Screenplay: Roger MacDougall with Guy Hamilton, Paul Winterton (aka Andrew Garve), and Ivan Foxwell, based on the novel The Megstone Plot by Andrew Garve. Director: Guy Hamilton.

   Money, is the root of all evil — and not a little comedy. It’s also the root of suave Commander Max Easton’s problems. Rammer Easton (James Mason), hero of the British submarine fleet, doesn’t have any — money, that is.

   At least not enough to impress the beautiful American widow he’s just met, Virginia Kilane (Vera Miles).

   Even worse she is engaged to Charles Holland (George Sanders), a supercilious snob and prig from the Foreign Office who does have money.

   Up to now Max has been quite happy with his status as a playboy and his job at the Admiralty where he commands a desk. But now he is falling hard for Virginia, and she is quite frank she doesn’t intend to live on his Royal Navy salary or pension.

   True love has its limits.

   Which is the spur of a bright idea.

   At this point the casual viewer should know two historical facts. The British have some of the strictest slander laws and the most irresponsible tabloid newspapers in the Western World, and all through the 1950’s those papers were filled with one story of treason and defection after another, culminating in the Kim Philby affair.

   It might also help to know that in the mid-fifties Commander Lionel Crabb, a decorated Royal Naval expert in underwater demolitions, went missing while on a mission to photograph a Russian trawler underwater in a British port. (Crabb was played by Laurence Harvey in Silent Enemy, which is the story of his exploits battling German saboteurs planting mines on British ships in Malta, winning the Victoria Cross.)

   The Crabb affair was never settled, but created headlines and speculation, and was treated fictionally in Noel Hynd’s The Khrushchev Objective (1987) a sequel of sorts to Brian Garfield’s best-selling novel The Paladin. (Both credit the pseudonymous Christopher Creighton as co-author.)

   Now, having completed our little historical aside, back to our story.

   The only valuable thing Max has access to is the Starfish project, a new nuclear submarine, but he’d rather not sell out to the Russians. (Neither prison nor exile on the Black Sea are appealing and Max is no traitor, just broke.)

   Still it occurs to him as he is bantering with Virginia that if he were to somehow be accused of treason and then cleared he could sue the press for a fortune. Silly idea, and yet…

   So Max manages to be seen with too much to drink at an embassy party with a Russian (who doesn’t speak a word of English), and then take his holidays, even selling his sports car before he leaves, and managing to lose the Starfish file behind an office cabinet before he goes.

   He pointedly stops at a northern port and makes an ass of himself asking a policeman about a Russian trawler in port, and then he takes his sail boat, the Shelldrake, and goes sailing off of Scotland where he sinks himself marooning himself comfortably on a barren rock in the lonely Skerries, and waits for nature and the press to take their course.

   And they do just that, with Max becoming the latest cause celebre. Too bad Virginia has let it slip to Charles about that clever little plan of Max’s. Now Charles wants to go to the police, but she persuades him it would cause a scandal. And anyway surely Max hasn’t gone through with it.

   Back on the island Max decides the bait is well and truly set, and rids himself of his survival gear and goes to set the bonfire that will bring rescue. Which is the point where fate intervenes in the form of a seagull. Max takes a swim, his matches are wet, his fuel is sunk, and now he really is marooned and without supplies. Meanwhile his story has cooled and everyone has forgotten who Rammer Easton was.

   Which is why Max is both relieved and a little unnerved when his rescuers turn out to be two men from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. Seems they got his message. The one he put in a bottle…

   But he didn’t send one.

   However Virginia did, when she realized Max was in trouble.

   And then that old stick Charles in the mud goes to the police, just as everything is falling into place.

   I won’t give away anymore, save to tell you Max gets the girl and the money and without breaking a single law — though he’s bent a few along the way.

   A Touch of Larceny is based on the novel The Megstone Plot by bestselling British thriller writer Andrew Garve (Paul Winterton) who also wrote as Roger Bax and Paul Somers.

   Garve’s best known books are The Ashes of Loda, The Cuckoo Line Affair, Ascent of D-13, A Hero for Leanda and A Hole in the Ground.

   His best known book in the States was Two if by Sea (1949), filmed in 1953 as Never Let Me Go, directed by by Delmer Daves and starring Clark Gable, Gene Tierney, and Richard Haydn.

   It’s about a pair of journalists trying to smuggle their Russian brides out of the Soviet Union in the post-war expulsion of the foreign press. (Garve himself was a former correspondent in Moscow and frequently used a Russian setting.) His novels are a mix of suspense, intrigue, and often humor like this one.

   A Touch of Larceny is one of those films the Brits do effortlessly with expert casts and flawless scripts. Mason is at his most charming as the roguish Max, and Sanders even manages to bring a touch of humor to the otherwise annoying Holland. Miles has seldom been more attractive in the kind of role usually reserved for Deborah Kerr, Margaret Leighton, or Jean Simmons.

   The laughs are of the quiet variety, and much of the films charm depends on Mason proving he should have done more comic roles. Watching this you can’t help but wonder if this is how he might have played James Bond (especially since director Hamilton would helm Goldfinger, the film that set the Bond phenomena in overdrive) if they had been able to convince Mason to do three films instead of two. (Cary Grant was offered the role first, but would only sign on for one.)

   Smart sophisticated and with just enough kick to keep the plot moving A Touch of Larceny is like a good champagne cocktail — light and amusing, but you’ll remember it in the morning.

         Overnight, Tuesday, July 21 to Wednesday, July 22 —

8:00 PM Footsteps in the Fog (1955)
   An ambitious housemaid learns her employer murdered his wife. Cast: Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Bill Travers. Dir: Arthur Lubin. C-90 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format
9:45 PM Secret Partner, The (1961)
   A shipping tycoon with a record becomes a suspect when money goes missing from the company vault. Cast: Stewart Granger, Bernard Lee, Haya Harareet. Dir: Basil Dearden. BW-91 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format
11:30 PM Light Touch, The (1952)
   An art thief tries to double cross his gangster boss. Cast: Stewart Granger, George Sanders, Pier Angeli. Dir: Richard Brooks. BW-93 mins, TV-G, CC
1:15 AM Whole Truth, The (1958)
   A woman tries to prove her cheating husband didn’t murder his mistress. Cast: Stewart Granger, Donna Reed, George Sanders. Dir: Dan Cohen, John Guillerman. BW-84 mins, TV-PG
2:45 AM Secret Invasion, The (1964)
   Five criminals win early pardons to infiltrate a Nazi outpost. Cast: Stewart Granger, Raf Vallone, Mickey Rooney. Dir: Roger Corman. C-95 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format

         All day Wednesday, July 22 —

11:15 AM Saint In New York, The (1938)
   The Saint goes undercover to get the goods on New York’s mob kingpins. Cast: Louis Hayward, Kay Sutton, Jonathan Hale. Dir: Ben Holmes. BW-72 mins, TV-G
12:30 PM Saint Strikes Back, The (1939)
   The Saint helps a young beauty take vengeance on the mobsters who ruined her father. Cast: George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, Barry Fitzgerald. Dir: John Farrow. BW-64 mins, TV-G
1:45 PM Saint In London, The (1939)
   The Saint’s investigation of a counterfeiting ring uncovers a nest of spies. Cast: George Sanders, David Burns, Sally Gray. Dir: John Paddy Carstairs. BW-72 mins, TV-G, CC
3:00 PM Saint’s Double Trouble, The (1940)
   Reformed jewel thief Simon Templer lands in hot water when a look-alike smuggles stolen goods out of Egypt. Cast: George Sanders, Jonathan Hale, Bela Lugosi. Dir: Jack Hively. BW-67 mins, TV-G, CC
4:15 PM Saint Takes Over, The (1940)
   Reformed jewel thief Simon Templar tries to help a police inspector who’s been framed on bribery charges. Cast: George Sanders, Jonathan Hale, Wendy Barrie. Dir: Jack Hively. BW-70 mins, TV-G, CC
5:30 PM Saint In Palm Springs, The (1941)
   Reformed jewel thief Simon Templar’s efforts to deliver a fortune in rare stamps are complicated by murder. Cast: George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, Jonathan Hale. Dir: Jack Hively. BW-66 mins, TV-G
6:45 PM Saint Meets The Tiger, The (1943)
   The Saint infiltrates a small English village run by smugglers. Cast: Hugh Sinclair, Jean Gillie, Clifford Evans. Dir: Paul L. Stein. BW-69 mins, TV-G

[UPDATE] 07-22-09. The best laid plans and all that. Our cable, Internet and phone service all took short vacations this evening and early morning. The cable came back after only a 15 minute recess, but it still means there’s going to be a big, unfillable hole in The Light Touch. I haven’t seen any of these Stewart Granger films, so the loss of any of them qualifies as at least a minor catastrophe. Hopefully it’s going to be only the one.

   As for later today, I must have seen all but one or two of the Saint movies, and I probably have permanent copies of them all, but I’ll record them anyway, just in case I don’t.

TWILIGHT WOMEN. Independent Film Distributors / Lippert, 1952. Originally released in the UK as Women of Twilight. René Ray, Lois Maxwell, Freda Jackson, Vida Hope, Joan Dowling, Laurence Harvey. Screenplay by Anatole de Grunwald, based on a play by Sylvia Rayman. Director: Gordon Parry.

   On the Obscure Movie front, several years ago I encountered an unintentionally bizarre little item called Twilight Women, made in Great Britain back in 1952. The word “twilight” had a specific connotation in sleazy paperbacks of those days, but the Twilight Women of this film all happen to be unwed mothers.

   Hard to believe now, but fifty years ago, Unwed Motherhood was a brand of shame roughly equivalent to a criminal record. In fact, the home for single-parents-to-be in Twilight Women is not unlike a prison at all, with its corrupt warden/landlady, her venal and sub-normal hench-persons, and the assorted tough gals, tramps and frightened innocents stuck in her care.

   Their stories play out with surprising intelligence and compassion, however (the adaptation of Sylvia Raymond’s play being done by Anatole de Grunewald, who was rather good at it) and while the film never tries for explicit social commentary, its depiction of women made victims of society’s moral code leaves little doubt of whom we should root for.

   This is, however, no message picture; it’s far too weird for that. For one thing, the print I saw had an odd blue tint to it, giving it the appearance of a Guy Madden film. For another, there’s a sort of introduction, in which the faces of the ladies morph eerily into one another.

   And strangest of all is the fleeting presence of Laurence Harvey, early in his career, playing some sort of lounge lizard. The sight (and sound) of this patently-hateful actor charming the ladies and belting out love songs in an obviously-dubbed baritone must be seen to be disbelieved.

   Or perhaps you shouldn’t. I still hear him sometimes, in the long dark nights of the soul…

Editorial comment:   We all know who Lois Maxwell is, I’m sure. She’s one of the young mothers in Twilight Women, while René Ray, whose photo you see below, plays another, she being gangster moll Viv Bruce — the gangster being Jerry Nolan, the low-life club singer played by Laurence Harvey, whose role in the film was pointed out so perceptively by Dan. (I am not positive, but I believe it is also René Ray’s photo on the DVD cover above.)

TOO LATE FOR TEARS. United Artists, 1949, aka Killer Bait. Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea, Arthur Kennedy, Don De Fore, Kristine Miller. Screenwriter: Roy Huggins, based on his book of the same title. Director: Byron Haskin.

   Lizabeth Scott fans, and I know there are many of you, will be happy to know that she pulls out all the stops in Too Late for Tears, as if you probably didn’t already know. I apologize for the cliche in the opening sentence, but it is true.

   As Jane Palmer, she and her husband (Arthur Kennedy) are driving down one those hills surrounding Los Angeles one evening when someone in a car speeding by in the opposite direction tosses a bag into the back seat of their convertible.

   Stunned, the pair manage to shake the car that begins to follow them immediately . Obviously the bag was intended for someone else; the Palmers have somehow been caught in the middle of something they know nothing about.

   One close-up scene will tell you all you want to know about what the rest of the movie has in store. One look at Jane Palmer’s face when she sees the contents of the bag tells the story, all of it. The bag is full of money, stacks and stacks of it. Alan Palmer doesn’t stand a chance. It’s keep the money or lose his wife.

   Not being a strong believer in telling a prospective viewer too much, I won’t, but it’s hard to resist. I’ll do my best not to reveal too much, but to tell you the truth, I can’t think of a noir movie as complicated as this one is.

   Dan Duryea. The money — a payoff of some kind? — that was meant for someone, that someone couldn’t be played better than by Dan Duryea. Can even he resist being caught up in Mrs. Palmer’s plans?

   Don DeFore. He claims to be Alan Palmer’s wartime buddy, Don Blake, but he’s turned up at a strange time. Although friendly enough, even to the point of being somewhat of a sap, he asks too many questions and doesn’t seem to be completely on the up-and-up

   Kristine Miller. Alan Palmer’s sister, Kathy, who finds herself falling for Don Blake, while frantically suspecting Jane Palmer of anything and everything.

   And of course don’t forget Lizabeth Scott as Jane Palmer. She can go from scowling grimness to a smiling luring vamp full of charm in a fraction of an instant. If she sees an opening, she’ll take it in a second.

   If ever a woman could devour a man who stands in her way in less time than it takes to flicker an eyelash, it is she.

   If you’re a fan of film noir, or even if you aren’t but you’re still reading this — if you haven’t seen this movie, by all means, do something about it, and soon.

   I think anyone who’s already seen this movie will tell you exactly the same thing, and for exactly the same reasons. Good direction, a great story, and five well-drawn performances. You can’t go wrong.

   Danny Fuller to Jane Palmer: Don’t ever change, Tiger. I don’t think I’d like you with a heart.