Movie review

Pharmacist Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart), night manager of a 24-hour Los Angeles drugstore, is a fool.

In an early scene in 1949’s Tension his wife Claire (Audrey Totter) is introduced by  sultry music as she’s eating dinner at the soda counter in Quimby’s drugstore.  Dressed in a slinky blouse, she takes an indifferent glance at her husband as he approaches tentatively, and she mumbles as she bites into a hamburger.

When he goes back to work on the other side of the store, Claire’s boyfriend shows up.  In an undisguised lie, she tells the counter clerk she’s going back to the Quimby’s apartment above the store.  Then she slips off her wedding ring and follows her suitor outside to his car.

Quimby’s blindness to his wife’s blatant infidelities, coupled with his puppy-dog devotion—even after she deserts him for a boyfriend—is the film’s plot foundation.  You know this is more than a domestic drama however; because, in addition to its suggestive and suspenseful musical score and noirish nighttime settings, the movie is introduced and narrated by a homicide detective, Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel played by Barry Sullivan.

Basehart’s character is so innocent and trusting you want to root for him, but he’s so foolish you just want to smack him.  He’s stuck on his wife even after he tracks her down to a love nest in Malibu, vainly begs her to come home and gets beat up by her boyfriend, Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough).

When the film played in a 1998 San Francisco festival, SF Chronicle movie reviewer Walter Addiego wrote that Quimby was a “prize-winning sap.” 

Does he ever wise up?

Yes, but slowly.

While Claire continues her suggestive shenanigans at the beach, Quimby concocts a complex plan creating a new name and a layered second identity for himself. It’s unclear if he still wants Claire back, but his main goal is revenge and his phony identity will somehow be his cover.

In his new name he rents a Westwood, Calif. apartment—in addition to his flat over the pharmacy.  He meets an attractive Westwood neighbor, Mary Chanler (Cyd Charisse). Chanler is attracted to Quimby, who tells her he sells cosmetics and is on the road on weekdays, home on weekends. The two go out together, but Quimby tries not to return her affections.  He’s working on his revenge.

 At a seemingly romantic evening beach rendezvous Chanler is giving Qumby the eye, showing she’s available, but Quimby is distracted.  Thinking of Claire or Daeger?

We’re now halfway through the picture waiting for something to happen. It finally does. Daeger is murdered. Big surprise.

Assigned to the case is Lt. Bonnabel who has already told us, in the film’s intro, that to solve crimes he likes to “work on people” and apply tension—here’s the title connection, get it?  He puts his method to work.

Lt. Edgar Gonsales (William Conrad) adds his weight to the investigation by helping interrogate Quimby.  After Quimby repeatedly proclaims his innocence, Gonsales hits him with stunning dialog:

“Get off the turntable Quimby. You’re starting to sound alike a stuck needle. It’s monotonous.”

Bonnabel has the annoying habit of twirling and stretching a rubber band with his fingers. More tension. But he uses a soft approach when he interviews Claire:

“Take it easy. Take it easy. You’re talking to me, Claire.

That’s like talking to an old friend.”

And later:

“Relax baby. Simmer down.”

Despite this insipid dialog, the acting manages to carry the story along.

Totter’s performance lifts and intensifies Claire beyond a shrewish, unfaithful wife. Eddie Muller, host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley, says Claire is “perhaps the most rotten wife in the history of Hollywood movies.”

Totter appeared in many noir films including The Unsuspecting with Claude Rains and the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery.

Basehart’s understated milquetoast Quimby is the perfect victim for Totter until he changes his tune late in the picture.  The versatile actor appeared in nearly 50 movies including other noir films and was notably Ishmael in the 1956 version of Moby Dick.  I remember him from the 1960s ScFi TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

The supporting cast, including Conrad and the always reliable Tom D’Andrea give a professionalism to the sometimes convoluted story.

Also of note, this was one of director John Barry’s last pictures in the US before moving to Europe to direct when he was blacklisted in the red scare of the 1950s.  He later returned to work in the US.

Implausibilities in the film are not limited to Quimby’s blind fixation on his floozy wife, but the twists and turns in the movie’s second half, Totter’s wonderful trampishness, the cinematography and sets make it good entertainment—not to be taken too seriously.