Reflections on ... Paid in Full (1950)

Recently watched: Paid in Full (1950). Tagline: “The story of a woman’s bitter victory.” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend is accompanying me only semi-willingly). 

Paid in Full opens on a note of panicked urgency, instantly plunging the viewer into the action. A pregnant woman in agonizing labour and on the verge of collapse manages to drive herself to the hospital on a stormy night. We learn that she’s Jane Langley (portrayed by magnetic film noir queen Lizabeth Scott). Due to life-threatening medical complications, Jane must undergo an emergency cesarean, but the dilemma is stark: either mother or baby will survive – but not both! Jane is asked for the father’s identity so the hospital can contact him, which prompts a flashback to explain just how we got to this crisis point. 

The luminous Scott alternated between bad girl (Dead Reckoning (1947), Too Late for Tears (1949)) and good girl (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Desert Fury (1947), Pitfall (1948)) roles with equal conviction. But calling the supremely virtuous, long-suffering Jane Langley “good” barely beings to cover it! Jane, you see, is hiding a painful secret (actually, multiple painful secrets – but that doesn’t become apparent until later). Her mother died tragically after giving birth to Jane’s little sister Nancy (foreshadowing alert!). Dutifully stepping into the maternal role, Jane raised Nancy herself. As adults, Jane is a clothing designer and Nancy (Diana Lynn) is a model who sashays around a department store showroom flourishing her sister’s creations. Jane is secretly, unrequitedly in love with Nancy’s fiancé, dashing advertising executive Bill Prentice (blandly handsome Robert Cummings. He’s like a walking ad for Brylcreem). In fact, Bill is so oblivious he rehearses his marriage proposal spiel on Jane! Stoically swallowing her heartbreak, Jane wishes the couple well. Did I mention that toxic Nancy is a spoiled rotten, selfish little bee-yatch? (Kudos to Lynn, who imbues Nancy with an almost Gloria Grahame-like surly petulance. Jane’s unwavering devotion to the undeserving Nancy has echoes of the Joan Crawford / Ann Blythe dynamic in Mildred Pearce (1945)).  

Paid in Full positions Nancy as the glamorous, sexually irresistible-to-men sister, whereas unlucky-in-love, married-to-her-career, always-the-bridesmaid singleton Jane is meant to be comparatively plain. But this is relative! Paid in Full is, after all, a golden age Hollywood production, and Jane is portrayed by the impossibly sultry Scott (Oh! That raspy voice!), who is exquisitely costumed (by Edith Head) and coiffed throughout. (In fact, the willowy Scott better resembles a fashion model than Lynn. Like her contemporary Lauren Bacall, Scott’s entryway into films was via modelling). The ever-sardonic Eve Arden offers comic relief as Tommy Thompson, Jane’s wise-cracking gal pal and work colleague. But Tommy also serves as a warning to Jane. As Bill cautions, Tommy “waited too long to get married. Now she’s too eager.” 

/ This smiling threesome is wildly unrepresentative of Paid in Full /

Mid-century melodramas routinely romanticized the notion of a woman’s noble self-sacrifice. Paid in Full stretches this to the point of lunacy. The film begins as an absorbing if conventional romantic triangle.  After a shocking and hideous tragedy occurs towards the end, the tone of Paid in Full goes full-tilt nuts, with Jane tipping into complete martyrdom and masochism. (The full significance of the title gradually becomes horribly apparent!). As a social document of its era, Paid in Full offers some fascinatingly archaic attitudes towards conceptions of matrimony, motherhood, fertility and “spinsterhood.” Watch the film here: 

 

Reflections on ... Lizabeth Scott in Dark City (1950)

Recently watched: Dark City (1950). I will always drop everything to watch a movie starring smoky-eyed, husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott (1922–2015) – one of the most haunting and memorable actresses of the forties and fifties and a perennial favourite of mine.  

But in Dark City (a minor but taut and suspenseful film noir crime drama), Scott’s role as Fran Garland, the long-suffering and neglected love interest of Charlton Heston, is unrewarding. On the plus side, since she’s playing a nightclub chanteuse, Scott gets to wear a series of sensational painted-on sequinned gowns (by Edith Head) and throatily warble some torch songs (although it’s not her own voice - she’s dubbed by a professional singer. Scott frequently played nightclub singers and one of the great mysteries of her career is that Paramount executives never permitted her to do her own singing onscreen – even though she was a stylish and alluring singer in her own right and released an album in 1957). 

But mostly Scott is required to be masochistically devoted to Heston and give him pleading, dewy-eyed looks. After juicy and challenging parts in superior films like Pitfall (1948) and Too Late for Tears (1949), Dark City must have felt anti-climactic for Scott. Eventually you want to grab Fran by the shoulders, shake her hard and say, “He’s just not that into you!”

Reflections on ... Too Late for Tears (1949)

From the Facebook event page:

“In one terrifying moment she realized what she had done … yet it was too late to turn back … too late for tears!”

Lizabeth Scott (1922 - 2015) was the most haunting and memorable of 1940s and 50s film noir actresses. Because of Scott’s languid mane of ash blonde hair, smoky eyes, sultry demeanor and raspy voice “that sounded as if it had been buried somewhere deep and was trying to claw its way out” she’s been frequently (and unfavorably) compared to the more famous Lauren Bacall. In fact, Scott was a much stranger, more intense and harder-working actress than Bacall, and made more interesting choices. And on Wednesday 20 November the Lobotomy Room film club presents her definitive movie - the tense 1949 film noir Too Late for Tears. It stars Scott at her most enthralling, almost serpentine as a suburban Los Angeles housewife with a treacherous and homicidal dark side.

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the camp! Third Wednesday night of the month. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt! We can accommodate 30 people maximum on film nights. Remember: the film is free so you can buy more cocktails! (One drink minimum).

/ German poster for Too Late for Tears /

“… or they were women like Lizabeth Scott, a kind of blonde Joan Crawford, who weren’t necessarily evil themselves, but whose very presence seemed to invite evil. Every time she appeared, the atmosphere became heavy and we knew that trouble, big trouble, was ahead.”

/ Feminist theorist Molly Haskell in her book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1987) /

/ Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy in Too Late for Tears /

Too Late for Tears opens somewhere in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles at night, with attractive middle-class couple Alan (Arthur Kennedy) and Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott) bickering in their convertible en route to a cocktail party thrown by one of his business associates. Murmuring about a headache, Jane wants to turn around, and grumbles of her dislike for the hostess (“I don’t like being patronized … it’s his diamond-studded wife looking down at me …”). A car speeds past them – and the driver hurls a satchel stuffed with $60,000 in cash into their backseat! It’s a freak incident of mistaken identity, an organized crime handover gone wrong – and changes the Palmers’ mundane existence forever. When Alan clambers into the backseat, opens the case and Jane glimpses the stacked mounds of bills for the first time, her eyes gleam hungrily and she gives an intriguing, satisfied Mona Lisa smile. In fact, her response is almost erotic! The forthright Alan’s instincts are to promptly report the situation to the police. Jane (Lady Macbeth of the suburbs) refuses and instantly seizes control of the situation.  As we soon see, lying and scheming comes instinctively to Jane. And worse is yet to come …

In no time, Jane is dipping into the illicit stash, splurging on a full-length mink coat. Striving to understand his wife’s rapaciousness, Alan pleas with her, “I’ve tried to give you everything!” “You’ve given me a dozen down payments in installments for the rest of our lives!” Jane snaps. One of Too Late’s many assets is that anti-heroine Jane’s motivation is weirdly plausible. When Alan laments that the money has changed her, Jane replies – truthfully – “I haven’t changed. It’s the way I am.” She then urgently launches into a dramatic confessional monologue, which may well be Scott’s career-best acting moment. “I’ve been dreaming of this all my life, ever since I was a kid. And it wasn’t because we were poor. Not “hungry poor” at least. I suppose in a way it was worse: we were white collar poor. Middle class poor. The kind of people who can’t quite keep up with the Joneses and die a little every day because they can’t!” She’s convinced other people look down on her, can sense her comparatively humble origins, and acts out of a toxic, gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, entitlement, class envy and greed. Details of Jane’s past are deliberately left murky. Alan is Jane’s second husband. All we know is that her previous husband was called Blanchard, who she apparently married just for his money, and who apparently committed suicide. How well does Alan even know her?

/ My advice? Find someone who looks at you as lovingly as Lizabeth Scott contemplates that ill-gotten mink coat in Too Late for Tears /  

Inevitably, violent but weak-willed alcoholic criminal sleazeball Danny Fuller arrives at the Palmers’ door to retrieve the money. (Danny is played by Dan Duryea, the peerless go-to actor for weak-willed alcoholic criminal sleazeballs. Duryea and Scott are electric onscreen together). Jane doesn’t respond to his threats the way he anticipates, even after Danny slaps her around demanding, “Where’s the dough?” “Housewives can get awfully bored sometimes …” she purrs, smiling under hooded eyelids. Danny rapidly surmises that Jane is a true sociopath, that this blonde housewife is far more dangerous than he is, that he is out of his depth – and that Jane is almost certainly going to kill him. “You’re quite a gal, Mrs Palmer …” Danny marvels as Jane aims a gun at him. And later: “You know, Tiger, I didn’t know they made them as beautiful as you. Or as smart. Or as hard …”

/ One of the all-time great film noir double acts? Dan Duryea and Lizabeth Scott /

Byron Haskin’s direction is undistinguished but flab-free and tense. Too Late was a low-budget independent b-movie and those limitations are detectable onscreen: the sets are Spartan (the Palmers’ apartment is as impersonal as a hotel room) and most of the action unfolds in only one or two locations. But rather than detract, I’d argue this austerity underscores Too Late’s sense of grittiness and the grim milieu Jane is determined to escape.

Early on – when Too Late was originally mooted as a big-budgeted A-list movie - Joan Crawford was reportedly attached to play Jane (with Kirk Douglas as Danny). Fascinating as it would have been to see Crawford essay this role, I’m grateful it went to Lizabeth Scott instead. Hollywood diva Crawford, after all, was already triumphing at the time in juicy noirs like Flamingo Road (1949) and The Damned Don’t Cry (1950). Too Late is Scott’s ultimate film and role and one of the few times she played the lead. (See also: Desert Fury (1947)). Usually Scott was delegated to femme fatale parts or female love interest for leading men like Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Dick Powell or Burt Lancaster.  Here for once Scott “carries” the film – and she is wholly compelling. For me, Too Late offers a swooning celebration of Scott’s allure, her distinctive nicotine-stained throaty voice and hard-edged beauty (those skeletal cheekbones! Those black batwing eyebrows!).

/ See Lizabeth Scott as the original desperate housewife in Too Late for Tears! /

Boiling with intelligence, smarter than everyone she encounters, constantly scheming, two-steps ahead of everyone else – as portrayed by Scott, you can’t help but root for Jane. (Not that it’s necessarily difficult to outsmart her male victims: often all Jane needs to do is give a melting smile to a man to get her way). And Hoskin’s direction repeatedly invites us to identify with the amoral Jane (we often see her alone in private moments, plotting, smiling to herself, determined). Not to divulge Too Late’s conclusion, but towards the end we get a fleeting glimpse of Jane in Mexico, clad in fur and jewelry and finally able to luxuriate in the luxe lifestyle she’s always dreamed of. Jane looks radiantly happy – and damn it, Lizabeth Scott’s bewitching performance convinces us she deserves it. In Too Late for Tears, Scott casts a spell. 

Note: for years the dimly-remembered Too Late for Tears (also sometimes known as Killer Bait) languished in public domain obscurity, with various grainy, poor-quality edited-for-TV versions circulating online. A cursory Google search will find these - but I strongly recommended you shell-out for the exquisite digitally remastered dual-format DVD / Blu-ray issued by Arrow in 2016.

Further reading:

My analysis of another exceptional Lizabeth Scott film noir - Pitfall (1948).

Reflections on ... Pitfall (1948)

/ A girl and a gun ... Lizabeth Scott and Raymond Burr in Pitfall (1948). Interestingly, this publicity still bears no relation to anything that happens in the film itself! /

A Lobotomy Room film recommendation: tense and compelling 1948 film noir Pitfall, directed by Andre de Toth. Thematically and stylistically it may remind you of two movies we’ve already screened at the monthly Lobotomy Room film club (currently on hiatus due to coronavirus pandemic!). Like Too Late for Tears (1949) – also starring the luscious croaky-voiced Lizabeth Scott – Pitfall is a film noir rooted in a degree of relative plausibility and set in the milieu of comfortably affluent sun-lit middle-class suburbia (suburban Los Angeles in this case). And married middle-aged protagonist John Forbes (the Olympic Insurance Company employee played by Dick Powell) finds himself in the same dilemma as Fred MacMurray’s character in the 1956 Douglas Sirk melodrama There’s Always Tomorrow (1956): he’s ostensibly achieved the American dream (good “white collar” salary, a beautiful house in the ‘burbs, dutiful wife, a cute child) but is consumed with a gnawing dissatisfaction with the ordered routine of his life and a yearning for excitement. Investigating what appears to be a standard embezzlement case, Forbes becomes entangled with alluring fashion model Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) and soon finds himself unwittingly caught-up in adultery, crime – and murder! To considerably complicate proceedings, corrupt private eye Raymond Burr - erotically fixated on Mona (this was before the concept of “stalking”) - is lurking on the sidelines. (Burr makes for a genuinely ominous villain not just due to his menacing physical bulk, but his eerily calm, unblinking demeanor).

/ Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott in Pitfall (1948) /

What's also noteworthy: for a Production Code-era film, Pitfall takes a remarkably non-judgmental and adult perspective on Forbes' extramarital affair. 

The whole cast is exemplary (including Jane Wyatt as Forbes’ unsuspecting wife) but Scott is heart-wrenching as Mona. In contrast to Too Late for Tears, here she’s a good girl – well, a complicated, sinned-against and down-on-her-luck girl striving to be good. (At every turn, Mona strives to do the honorable thing - which never does her any favours). It’s astonishing to reflect that years ago Scott was routinely dismissed as an ersatz Lauren Bacall. An all-too typical assessment is writer Penny Stalling’s: “Scott ... churned out twenty-two films between 1945 and 1953, but few are memorable.” How could a filmography studded with gems likes Pitfall, Too Late for Tears and Desert Fury be “unmemorable”? Even Scott’s lesser films (like The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers and Dead Reckoning) are at least interesting! In Pitfall, Scott is particularly seductive when extolling the virtues of day-time drinking: “Have you ever noticed if for some reason you want to feel completely out of step with the rest of the world, the only thing to do is sit around a cocktail lounge in the afternoon?”

High quality version of Pitfall on YouTube here. 

Further reading.

19 October 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

/ And God Created ... Brigitte Bardot /

Happily, my jinxed period at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern has definitely has come to an end – this Dr Sketchy was smooth sailing and a really enjoyable night. My friend Jim (who I go to Viva Las Vegas most years with) turned up with a surprise guest: his Staffordshire bull terrier Daisy. Daisy was beautifully-behaved, nestling on the floor in the corner of the DJ booth. It was an added, unexpected bonus to get to kneel down and kiss a dog on the forehead while DJ’ing.

/ Sweet face: Daisy photographed at my place in February 2011. She's a bit bigger now. Who's a good girl? Who's a good girl? You are, Daisy /

The emcee this time was Dusty Limits (Weimar Republic decadence personified), and we had two burlesque performers/models: brunette Australian minx Sarina del Fuego and the frankly very fit Spencer Maybe. For once I kept the tone a bit classy and elegant (relatively-speaking), at least during Sarina’s pose. After her performance, Sarina had stripped down to just black lace lingerie and a kinky black lace eye mask. Her musical selection for her striptease was the dreamy finger-snapping instrumental “Perdita” by Angelo Badalementi, from the soundtrack to the 1990 David Lynch film Wild at Heart. Inspired by the song and Sarina’s outfit, rather than crank-up the sleaze and tittyshakers, I played some moodily lingering 1950s cool jazz-inflected make-out music: Dolores Gray's minimalist bongo drum-propelled "You're My Thrill", Julie London, Chet Baker, Eartha purring “I Want to Be Evil.”



Later I compensated when our male “boylesque” performer Spencer Maybe posed, and then he and Sarina posed together, spinning my raunchiest single-entendre novelty songs like “Tony’s Got Hot Nuts” by Faye Richmonde and Filthy McNasty’s “Ice Man”. I also incorporated exotica (Yma Sumac, Martin Denny), rockabilly, rhythm and blues and some 1960s French pop (Brigitte Bardot, more than one song by Johnny Hallyday!).

During Spencer’s pose I also played a track by Lizabeth Scott, the most haunting and enigmatic of 1940s and 50s film noir actresses. Because of Scott’s languid mane of ash blonde hair, smoky eyes, sultry and insolent demeanour and raspy low voice “that sounded as if it had been buried somewhere deep and was trying to claw its way out” (John Kobal) she’s been frequently (and unfavourably) compared to the more famous Lauren Bacall. In fact, Scott was a much stranger, more intense and harder-working actress than Bacall, and made more interesting choices.

A true actrice maudite, Scott has traditionally been disparaged or overlooked by mainstream film historians. An all-too typical assessment is writer Penny Stalling’s: “Scott ... churned out twenty-two films between 1945 and 1953, but few are memorable.” In fact Scott’s filmography between 1945 and 1957 (when she abruptly retired), is studded with obscure gems, and virtually all of them are films noir, partnering her with many of the greats of the genre: Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan. It’s only in recent years that Scott has emerged as a genuine cult figure for old film obsessives (like me!) and her career has been more generously reappraised. In particular, search out 1949’s Too Late for Tears (aka Killer Bait) to see Lizabeth Scott at her most mesmerising, almost serpentine as a suburban Los Angeles housewife with a treacherous and homicidal dark side.

/ Separated at birth: Lauren Bacall and Lizabeth Scott /

By the mid-50s the film noir cycle was coming to an end as public tastes changed, and so were Scott’s days as a leading lady. What certainly was a contributing factor to her abrupt and premature retirement was scandal magazine Confidential “outing” her as lesbian in 1955 – making her what must be one of the first victims of tabloid homophobia. In the article Confidential gloated “In recent years Scotty’s almost nonexistent career has allowed her to roam further afield. In one jaunt to Europe she headed straight for Paris and the left bank where she took up with Frede, the city’s most notorious lesbian queen and operator of a nightclub devoted exclusively to entertaining deviates just like herself.” (In fact the shadowy Frede was the proprietoress of the posh Parisian nightclub Carroll’s, where key figures of French show business performed to a presumably mixed clientele. A very young Eartha Kitt, for example, launched her singing career there in the late 1940s. In her 1989 memoirs Kitt describes Frede (a former lover of Marlene Dietrich’s) as “the most beautiful manly-looking lady in the world”).

/ An intriguingly butch study of Lizabeth Scott. The safety pin makes a punk statement /

Scott took legal action against the magazine, but the damage was done and shortly afterwards she quit the film industry – and withdrew from public life. To date, Scott has never publicly acknowledged the gay rumours – certainly the general consensus was that she had been the mistress of (married) film mogul Hal B Wallis, who’d guided her career in the 1940s at Paramount. Now 89, the elusive Scott never married and lives in deep seclusion in her palatial Hollywood Boulevard mansion, declining all interview requests as the enigma around her grows. We can only hope Scott writes an autobiography before she dies or gives one last genuinely revealing interview – but at this point it looks likely she’s taking her secrets to her grave.

After completing her last major film role (in the 1957 Elvis Presley musical Loving You, incongruously enough!), Scott’s one last gasp at a show business career was re-launching herself as a torch singer with the album Lizabeth in 1957. (Weirdly, Scott frequently played nightclub singers in her films – but always lip-synched over another singer’s dubbed voice!). It’s an alluring and credible album, with Scott warbling jazz standards like “Willow Weep for Me” and “Can’t Get Out of This Mood” in a husky 40 cigarettes-a-day voice over stylish arrangements courtesy of Henri Rene and his Orchestra (he’d previously collaborated with Eartha Kitt, so knew a thing or two about chanteuses with idiosyncratic voices). Sadly, Lizabeth wasn’t a hit, and Scott didn’t pursue singing but I love to drop in an occasional track from it when I DJ.

/ The cover of Lizabeth Scott's 1957 album Lizabeth /



/ Lovely and dramatic: Lizabeth Scott singing "He is a Man" on television in 1958 from her album Lizabeth. The guy leaning against the lamp post in a trench coat whistling is such a nice touch /

Watermelon Gin - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
Town without Pity - James Chance
Pas Cette Chanson - Johnny Hallyday
Because of Love - Billy Fury
Early Every Morning - Dinah Washington
Beauty is Only Skin-Deep - Robert Mitchum
Too Old to Cut the Mustard - Marlene Dietrich and Rosemary Clooney
Virgenes Del Sol - Yma Sumac
Exotique Bossa Nova / Quiet Village Bossa Nova - Martin Denny
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Contact - Brigitte Bardot
Rockin' Bongos - Chaino
Greasy Chicken - Andre Williams
Follow the Leader - Wiley Terry
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Whisper Your Love - The Phantom
I'll Drown in My Own Tears - Lula Reed
The Fire of Love - Jody Reynolds
It - The Regal-Aires
Miss Irene - Ginny Kennedy
Give Me a Woman - Andy Starr
Don't You Feel My Leg - Blue Lu Barker
Night Scene - The Rumblers
Woh! Woh! Yeah! - The Dynamos
Drive-In - The Jaguars
You're My Thrill - Dolores Gray
Shadow Woman - Julie London
Sexe - Line Renaud
I Want to Be Evil - Eartha Kitt
Lonely Hours - Sarah Vaughan
Shangri-La - Spikes Jones New Band
Little Girl Blue - Chet Baker
Crawfish - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
I Learn a Merengue, Mama - Robert Mitchum
Go, Calypso! - Mamie van Doren
Rock-a-Hula - Elvis Presley
Honalulu Rock'n'Roll - Eartha Kitt
Elle est terrible - Johnny Hallyday
L'appareil a sous - Brigitte Bardot
You Can't Stop Her - Bobby Marchan
Roll with Me Henry - Etta James
Man's Favourite Sport - Ann-Margret
Cat Man - Gene Vincent
Tiger - Sparkle Moore
Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad - Betty Hutton
He Is a Man - Lizabeth Scott
The Strip - The Upsetters
Tony's Got Hot Nuts - Faye Richmonde
Ice Man - Filthy McNasty
Ford Mustang - Serge Gainsbourg
Seperate the Man from the Boys - Mamie van Doren
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Kruschev Twist - Melvin Gayle
Wino - Jack McVea
Summertime - Little Esther
La Javanaise - Juliette Greco
Fever - Hildegard Knef
Work Song - Nina Simone
Beat Girl - Adam Faith
You've Changed - Billie Holiday

/ For all you glove freaks out there, as modelled by stripper and bondage / fetish model Tana Louise, aka "The Cincinnati Sinner" /