Tension (1950)

January 11, 1950, release date

Directed by John Berry

Screenplay by Allen Rivkin

Story by John D. Klorer

Music by André Previn

Edited by Albert Akst

Cinematography by Harry Stradling

Richard Basehart as Warren Quimby, aka Paul Sothern

Audrey Totter as Claire Quimby

Cyd Charisse as Mary Chanler

Barry Sullivan as Police Lt. Collier Bonnabel

Lloyd Gough as Barney Deager

Tom D’Andrea as Freddie, counter help at Coast to Coast drugstore

William Conrad as Police Lt. Edgar “Blackie” Gonsales

Tito Renaldo as Narco, Deager’s houseboy

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I had to see Tension at least twice before I noticed the plot’s intricacies, and I’m sure there’s plenty more that I missed. But I won’t mind seeing this film again to sort things out.

Collier Bonnabel introduces himself on-screen as a homicide detective, and that is where Tension starts, with him addressing the audience directly:

“. . . I only know one way, one thing that breaks them wide open. Tension. I work on people, on suspects. Play up to them. Play up to their strengths, pour it on their weaknesses. Romance ’em or ignore ’em. Kiss ’em. Press ’em. But whatever way, keep stretching them. Everything, everybody’s got a breaking point. And when they get stretched so tight, they can’t take it any longer . . .” [the title card for the movie now appears: Tension].

Bonnabel continues in voice-over to start the story and to introduce Warren Quimby, whose wife Claire left him for Barney Deager. Deager is killed rather early in the film, and the Quimbys are likely suspects: Claire Quimby had an affair with Deager, which gives Warren Quimby, and maybe Claire, too, a motive. And Warren does want to kill Deager. He in fact assumes another identity (as Paul Sothern) so he can carry out his plan.

(This blog post about Tension contains spoilers.)

In the meantime, Bonnabel manipulates the suspects and the witnesses in his murder investigation to get the information he needs. He also manipulates the viewers in setting up the story as one in which Warren Quimby is the primary murder suspect. But the plot twists and turns until the final scene.

Claire Quimby doesn’t want anything to do with a house and children in suburbia: She wants no part of the suburban postwar lifestyle, and she’d like more lucrative prospects than what her husband Warren can offer. Warren takes her out to a new tract development to look at a house that he apparently has already picked out. But Claire won’t even get out of the car to look at it. She is more attached to her doll than she is to any one man, including her husband. And she doesn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.

Why is a grown woman carrying around that doll? The fact that the film never explains anything about the doll merely adds to the unease and mystery. Claire Quimby’s doll isn’t the only prop crying out to be noticed, I thought. Barney Deager’s barbecue fork looks more like a devil’s pitchfork. It almost becomes the murder weapon. Or does it? Viewers can’t be entirely sure until later in the film.

And is the whole film a flashback? Bonnabel addresses the audience in voice-over, but he is also an active on-screen participant in the story starting at 00:43:21. That’s when the murder investigation begins, but Lieutenant Bonnabel and his partner Lieutenant Gonsales appear for the first time at 00:12:19, in the background of a scene when Warren Quimby is on the sidewalk watching his wife Claire walk out of the all-night, twenty-four-hour drugstore where he works. And she’s in the company of another man.

When the murder investigation starts, Bonnabel and Gonsales arrive at the Quimby apartment to talk to Claire and Warren Quimby. Bonnabel has Mary Chanler’s stick figure. (Chanler knows Warren as Paul Sothern and regards him as her kind and dutiful boyfriend.) Chanler makes these stick figures and places one of them in Warren’s front jacket pocket. It falls out of his pocket when he goes to Barney Deager’s house with the intention of killing him but then changes his mind. It’s clear that Bonnabel and Gonsales have been to the murder scene, maybe even immediately before arriving at the Quimbys’, but viewers know that Warren Quimby didn’t kill Barney Deager. What do Bonnabel and Gonsales know about Deager’s murder at this point?

Bonnabel’s voice-over continues at the drugstore, at the end of the scene during which he brings Mary Chanler there to confront Warren Quimby. It’s the first time that Mary Chanler sees Warren in his old milieu and as Warren Quimby, but she refuses to let go of her faith in him. She walks out of the drugstore, and Bonnabel, while still on-screen, says in voice-over that maybe Claire is the next one to whom he should apply his interrogation techniques.

When Bonnabel meets Claire Quimby in the apartment that her husband has rented as Paul Sothern, he says to her: “I got a file goes back further than you’d like to remember and up to where you wish you could forget. And that includes San Diego. I like that part about San Diego. That makes good reading, Claire.” San Diego is where she and Warren met and got married, but the implication is that she was working there as a prostitute and perhaps was involved in other criminal activity. Has Bonnabel been tailing Claire Quimby all along? Does he suspect her of Barney Deager’s murder from the beginning? Is this story all flashback for detectives Bonnabel and Gonsales?

Tension is an unconventional film noir. Sure, it has a femme fatale in Claire Quimby and a murder that needs to be solved. And everything about the film creates doubt: for the characters and for the viewers. The lead detective Bonnabel is unconventional in his approach to solving homicide cases: He will do whatever it takes to get his murderer. His role in the story helps to make Tension a great film noir, one I’ll have to see again.