Imagine the blistering world of Shadows transformed into a Hollywood film and you can see why Too Late Blues was a failure with critics who were confounded by its ragged style, and by the choice of pop singer Bobby Darin in the role of a hipster jazz pianist. On reappraisal, both are entirely appropriate for this exploration of self-destruction and wayward talent in the world of Los Angeles jazz musicians in the late fifties and early sixties. Darin plays "Ghost" Wakefield, aptly named for the ethereality of his presence which, as Ray Carney writes, "is a sign of how unable he is to transform his genius into practical power." After years of scraping around L.A. jazz haunts for play dates with his quintet, he gives up his artistic aspirations and "goes commercial," leaving his band to the cheap joints and his singer-lover (Stella Stevens) to the cheap Johns. (Withal, Ghost's own greatest success is as a gigolo). On the film's release, the only two critics to write positive reviews were Albert Johnson in Film Quarterly and Raymond Durgnat in Films and Filming. "A very strange and exciting film to come from a Hollywood studio," Johnson wrote, "...capturing the argot-swift, hardboiled and sometimes poetic-of music-making hipsters without a cause." More recently, Ray Carney speculated on that cause: "Ghost is an idealist whose problem is that he can't quite find a focus for his dreams. His somewhat dazed expression might have been a lot like Cassavetes' own during the filming-Cassavetes the independent who woke up to find himself in a Hollywood studio."