Too Late for Tears

Don DeFore and Lizabeth Scott
Jane and Alan Palmer (Scott and Kennedy) are driving to a party in the Hollywood Hills one evening when someone in another car throws a suitcase into the back seat of their convertible. They open it and discover packs of cash. They are chased by yet another car for a short time but get away. Back at their upper-middle-class Hollywood apartment, they examine the cash. Jane wants to keep the money, but Alan wants to take it to the police. Alan places the suitcase and cash in a locker at Union Station, hoping he can sway Jane into surrendering it to the police.
A few days later while Alan is at work, Danny (Duryea) shows up at the Palmers' apartment, tells Jane he is a detective and quickly learns she has begun spending the money. Her husband Alan likewise becomes upset when he finds she has been running up bills, clearly planning to spend the money they had agreed to store and leave untouched. Jane makes a deal with Danny to split the money. Planning to kill him, she drives Danny up into the hills on the pretense they will retrieve the cash where it's been buried. He suspects her intentions and flees.
She and Alan plan a romantic evening together to make amends for their squabbling about the money. She asks Danny to meet her in the evening at Westlake Park near downtown Los Angeles, where she and Alan will be taking a boat ride. Jane has planned to kill her husband Alan in the boat but is stopped by a pang of guilt and begs him to take her to shore, then blurts out that she wants to send the claim check for the locker to the police. Unaware of why his wife is upset, Alan wants to continue with the boat ride. Hoping to find cigarettes, he picks up her bag and his own gun falls out. The startled look on his face tells Jane he knows straight off what she had in mind, she grabs the gun, they struggle and she shoots, killing him. When Danny sees the body he fears getting involved in a murder, but Jane threatens to tell the police he killed her husband unless he helps her. As she planned earlier, after dumping the body in the lake they leave the park together so as to mislead witnesses into thinking she left with her husband. She reports Alan to the police as a missing person.




Miller as Kathy Palmer
Don Blake (DeFore) appears at the Palmer apartment where he discovers Alan's sister Kathy (Kristine Miller) leaving surreptitiously. Don claims to be an old army buddy of Alan's on vacation in Los Angeles. While looking into what happened to Alan, Don falls in love with Kathy, who lives across the hall from her brother and sister-in-law and has grown worried about Jane. Jane finds out that Don never knew Alan and hits him over the head with a pistol. Having retrieved the cash out of the locker at Union Station, she meets a wholly drunken Danny at his apartment and says she needs him to help her run away. Danny tells Jane he knows he still can't trust her, but that he has fallen in love with her and that money was a "once in a lifetime" blackmail payoff from an insurance scam. She understands this means the money is unmarked and its disappearance won't be reported to the police. She kills Danny with a poisoned drink.
After finding Danny's body, the Los Angeles police tell Don that if he wants them to drag the small lake at Westlake Park in search of Jane's missing husband, he must pay thousands of dollars. Meanwhile Jane flees with all the money to Mexico City, where Don finds her at the posh Reforma Hotel living in a lavish penthouse. Thinking he is either after the money or with the police, Jane pleads with him to take half. Don tells her he is the brother of Jane's earlier, first husband Bob Blanchard and that he now understands how she could have driven him into killing himself. As Mexican police detectives rush into the room, Jane quickly backs away in tears onto a balcony, then screams as she falls over the railing to her death.

Question: What does Alan hope to find in Jane's bag?
Answer: Cigarettes