PodBill
Just what I expected
Lightdeossk
Captivating movie !
StyleSk8r
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
topherson
Saw the TCM re-run of this and I may say this is totally a fantastic movie! Never heard of Richard Basehart until now. Better check out the rest of his films.
Claudio Carvalho
The timid pharmacist Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart) works hard in the night shift of a drugstore to give a good life to his promiscuous wife Claire Quimby (Audrey Totter). When Claire leaves him to live with her lover, the liquor salesman Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough), Warren plots a scheme to kill Barney. He creates a new identity of a man called Paul Sothern and moves during the weekends to an apartment, telling that he is a traveling salesman to explain the absence along the week. He creates evidences that Paul Sothern wants to get rid off Barney, but soon he falls in love with his next door neighbor Mary Chanler (Cyd Charisse). One night, he goes to the Barney's house by Malibu beach but he gives up killing him; instead he tells Barney that he will divorce Claire. He goes home to move to Mary's apartment but out of the blue, Claire returns and tells that Barney was murdered. When Lieutenants Collier Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan) and Edgar Gonsales (William Conrad) come to his apartment, Warren provides alibi to Claire. However the smart Lieutenant Bonnabel proceeds his investigation and finds that Warren Quimby and Paul Sothern are the same man and Warren is arrested. Will Bonnabel finds the truth?"Tension" is a great film-noir, with an excellent story of a meek cuckold that is humiliated when his unfaithful wife moves to the house of her lover and plots an intelligent revenge plan to kill his competitor. Richard Basehart and Audrey Totter are perfect in their roles with excellent performances. He calls off his scheme but the man is killed anyway and he is forced by his wife to provide alibi to her. The "modus operandi" of the cynical detective Collier Bonnabel building tension among the suspects and his final action telling to Claire that the furniture in Paul's apartment had been replaced is unique. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Tensão" ("Tension")
Spikeopath
Tension is directed by John Berry and adapted to screenplay by Allen Rivkin from a story by John D. Klorer. It stars Richard Baseheart, Audrey Totter, Cyd Charisse, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Gough and William Conrad. Music is by Andre Previn and cinematography by Harry Stradling.Tight and compact noir pot boiler that finds Baseheart as a drugstore manager married to bitch babe Totter. Planning to do away with her lover, Baseheart is stumped when someone beats him to it. But he of course is still the main suspect, so creating a new identity for himself he sets about enacting the crime only to find there's a mystery to unravel before hard coppers Sullivan and Conrad jump on him from a great height.Totter files in for classic femme fatale duties as Tension thrives on the post-war period of change as many Americans yearned for a better life away from the disillusionment of their current existence. Baseheart is the classic sap, dreaming of some picket fence nirvana with his vixen wife, only to have his illusions shattered by her callous clambering for the finer things in life, including a more alpha male suitor in the imposing form of Lloyd Gough. But wait! Baseheart has some brains, he has ideas above his station to commit the perfect crime, but inventing a new identity, which is basically just using contact lenses instead of glasses, it opens up a new avenue for him in the shapely form of Cyd Charisse.Rivkin's screenplay gives Totter licence to bitch up big time, with abuse of her sultry charms and a viper tongue delivering barbs, Totter's Claire Quimby is very much a quintessential femme fatale and subsequently Totter walks away with the movie. Elsewhere isn't bad though, it's a roll call of stoic noir performers, from Sullivan's hard- nosed detective and Conrad's doughnut twirling menace, to Gough's looming presence and Charisse's vulnerable beauty, it's a very well cast picture. Sealing the deal is Berry's unfussy direction, Stradling's atmospheric photography and Previn's musical score that puts the tense in Tension.Some of it's daft, such as the Clark Kent line of character invention, and you don't have to be a genius to know who committed the foul deed, but this is a good un' for sure. 7/10
secondtake
Tension (1949)This is such a unique surprise, it makes me think there are scores of other obscure films that are waiting to be watched. The plot, the lead actors, and the steady, crisp filming and editing prove once again that Hollywood was capable of making even ordinary seeming films excellent.The biggest surprise surely is the confidence, subtle acting by lead man (or lead men, as you'll see), Richard Basehart. His principle role is a little like Harold Lloyd from the silent days, and he is at such ease with his everyday boyish man with glasses persona you forget he's acting. But then he takes on a second role, and is dapper and super likable and the kind of guy women fall for. Basehart might actually lack a little edge, or quirkiness, to make him memorable. And he might even be good looking in too ordinary a way for a leading male.Actresses face a different audience in this way, and the second leading female, Cyd Charisse, is one of those completely ordinarily good looking leading ladies who survived just on those plain good looks, maybe like Donna Reed seemed to. (Charisse, of course, is more famous for her dancing.) The other leading female, more typecast but searingly cool and calculating, a pure femme fatale, is played by Audrey Totter, in a mold along the lines of Gloria Grahame. Totter has to play both sides of a fence, too, and does so brilliantly.Another surprise is surely Barry Sullivan, not so much for his acting, which is spot on as a detective, but for the methods this detective uses to catch his prey. We all fall for it, at least partly, and then it comes to a high pitch and dramatic end. There are surprisingly few clichés at work here. Even the setting, a fabulous pharmacy, is a fresh, and complex, and useful backdrop for the several twists as they go on. There is a beach house, and a homicide office, and noirish night scenery, but these are secondary. As much as it remains a romantic crime melodrama, it can't avoid certain useful tropes, but it's so original in other ways, I could watch it again today.
