Last year I read James M. Cain's great lost novel The Cocktail Waitress, which tells one of his typical femme fatale crime stories but entirely from the (not completely reliable) POV of the femme fatale herself. I thought this was a pretty interesting novelty, but then I saw Too Late for Tears, which does the same damn thing only without the unreliable narrator bit to take the sting out of her terrible deeds.

Lizabeth Scott, she with the pre-aged face (it isn't that she looks old, it's that she looks like she's going to be old in a few decades), plays the Bad One as terrifyingly as they get - so much so that it's completely believable when one man…