Everyone has their favorite 1940s "bad girl." Some of mine: Ann Savage in Detour (1945), Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1948), Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross (1949), Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (1947, and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) but for my money the baddest of them all, the baddest of the bad, is sultry homicidal Lizabeth Scott as Jane Palmer in Too Late for Tears (1948). It's not just that she murders her first husband, shoots her second, and poisons her accomplice. Or that she sleeps with blackmailer Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) to enlist him to her cause. Or that she betrays friend, foe and family.Or that she's manipulative, vengeful, hedonistic ("I want money") and depraved. It's that she's utterly soulless, conscienceless, and heartless. Not a tinge of fellow-feeling. She could out-Goneril Goneril, bad girl of the canonical classics.
The ending of the film is a disappointment. Instead of Jane Palmer sent to the electric chair or locked in the hoosegow for life, she's allowed to fall out of a window and die. Not fair -- I wanted retribution.
On second thought, if she had been arrested, she would have corrupted the police, compromised the judicial system, and caused the death of a handful of fellow prisoners and prison guards. Maybe it's just as well to kill her off and be done with it.
Here's Lizabeth Scott holding a gun on her nemesis (Don DeFore). Is she bad or what?
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