Tension (MGM, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode, I switched to Turner Classic Movies for two crime thrillers in a row, Tension (1949) and Get Shorty (1995). Tension was shown on Eddie Muller’s “Noir AlleyI program and it certainly qualifies. It was directed by John Berry from a script by Allen Rivkin based on a story by John D. Klorer – though I hven’t been able to find out whether Klorer published the piece as a short story or wrote it for the film as a screen original. It’s the story of a mild-mannered night manager of a drugstore, Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart, surprisingly restrained by his usual standards). He’s meticulously saving up his money so he can buy a house on the G.I. Bill – he’s a World War II veteran, no surprise there – and his main problem is his femme fatale wife Claire (Audrey Totter). Claire met him in San Diego just before he shipped out to fight the war, and she laments that when they first started dating he was a good-time guy whom she had fun. Now he spends all night at his drugstore job and sleeps during the day, and the two live together in an apartment above the drugstore. She wants a more affluent man who’ll be willing to spend money on her, and she’s found him in the person of Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough). Claire leaves Warren and moves in to Deager’s beach house (which practically becomes a character itself),and when Warren shows up to get here back he first has to deal with Deager’s manservant, former boxer Freddie (Tom D’Andrea),and then with Deager himself. When Warren grabs Claire’s arm to force her to leave Deager and come back to him, Deager beats him up and Warren is humiliated. (It’s faintly possible to read Claire as a tough-minded independent woman the way I read Virginia Mayo’s character in The Best Years of Our Lives, but any reaction like t hat is undercut by the film’s iconography – Claire is an electrifying blonde on the order of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice – and also André Previn’s musical score, which heralds her every entrance with a sleazy saxophone solo just to make sure we get the point that she’s a “bad girl.”).

Warren lays out an elaborate plan to assume an alternate identity as “:Paul Sotnern” (he gets the name from a movie magazine featuring Ann Sotnern on the cover). He has himself fitted with contact lenses so people won’t instantly recognize him as the Warren Quimby who wears spectacles (in Eddie Mu ller’s introduction he noted that this film was made just one year after soft-plastic contact lenses came on the market and vastly expanded the market for them). He rents a new apartment in his “Paul Sothern” identity (wouldn’t he have had, even in 1949, to show I.D.?) and plans to kill Deager, then just disappear, wiping out all traces of “Paul Sothern” from the record and reassuming his Warren Quimby identity. Only he meets and falls in love with one of his neighbors, Mary Chanler (Cyd Charisse, turning in a surprisingly good performance given that she’s mainly known as a dancer and star of musicals), and when “Paul Sothern” disappears she reports him to the police as a missing person. She happens to have a photo of him which she took as part of one of the most bizarre “meet-cutes” of all time: she’s standing up with her legs spread-eagled to try to get a photo, and he bumps into her on his way back from a grocery store and drops his bags of food. Eventually “Paul” goes to Deager’s home intending to kill him –only it’s too late. When he arrives, Deager is already dead, shot by Claire for reasons Klorer and/or Rivkin never make clear (presumably he was tiring of her and was giving her the kiss-off, telling her to go back to her ineffectual druggist husband). She insists that he cover for her because otherwise he’d be the prime suspect, and the two are interrogated by police lieutenants Collier Bonnabet (Barry Sullivan, in a refreshingchange from his own crook roles) and Edgar Gonzalez (the young William Conrad).

One unusual aspect of this film is it has a voice-over narration, not from one of the standard noir characters but from Lt. Bonnabet, who delivers it in the same clipped monotone Jack Webb later made famous in his portrayal of a hard-nosed cop on the Dragnet TV series. Bonnabet explains to us his philosophy of solving crimes, stretching a large rubber band to make his point, he tells us that he likes to ratchet up the tension on his prime suspect until the person snaps and confesses. Through much of the latter half of the film he actually romances Claire and says to him that as soon as the police department drops the investigation as a cold case, he’ll take her to Acapulco as her lover. Only, as we begin to suspect, it’s a trap; he’s become convinced that Claire, not Warren,killed Deager, and in a quite strong finish at the apartment “Paul” lived in at the beach (which Claire says is much nicer than the hovel he had her living in above the drugstore), Claire tries to plant the gun she used to kill Deager and is caught by Lt. Bonnabet. Tension is a quite good fiim noir which struck me as better this time around than it had when Charles and I watched it together before. It had at least two blacklisted, director John Berry (who fled the U.S., arrived in Europe and took a job co-directing with Leo Joannon the last Laurel and Hardy film, Utopia a.k.a. Atoll K; unlike such other blacklisted directors as Joseph Losey or Jules Dassin, he returned to the U.S. at least occasionally to make films) and actor Lloyd Gough, whose character was not only richer than Basehart’s but considerably hotter, In one shot Berry and cinematographer Harry Stradling get close enough to him to show off not only the hair on his chest but the hair on his back as well as his pecs to die for. Yum!