Tension (1949)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Something different for Richard Basehart. He plays a plain, ordinary, unassuming man with a wife, Audrey Totter, who is out for plenty of action. Tired of her life with him, she takes up with another and leaves him.Basehart changes his name and puts on contact lenses in his plot to kill the guy, only to have a change of heart and find love with his new neighbor, played surprisingly by Cyd Charisse, in a totally non-musical, non-dancing role.The only problem is that wife Totter kills the guy and tries to blame her husband for the crime. Barry Sullivan plays the really smart officer who outwits the Totter character in the end.Totter is excellent here as the brassy blond whose desire for wanting more out of life gets in her deep trouble.

Directed by John Berry, TENSION is borderline noir besides being a very interesting drama. Warren Quimby(Richard Basehart) is a mild-mannered pharmacist with a minimal existence, but with hopes and dreams of a much better life with his wife Claire(Audrey Totter). Warren's problem is Claire; he watches her leave with different men for a night on the town. Mrs. Quimby is tired of living in an apartment above the pharmacy and tired of Warren; she longs for a "man of means" that can afford to provide a party life. Warren finds his wife at the home of a liquor salesman, who bullies the mousy pharmacist in front of Claire. But a man can only take so much. Warren creates an alternate identity in plans of murdering his wife's newest lover. Other players include: Cyd Charisse, Barry Sullivan, William Conrad and Tom D'Andrea.

While the film focuses on Richard Basehart's part as a jilted husband, it's actually Audrey Totter who turns out to be in the middle of the main plot. She plays his unsatisfied wife, unsatisfied financially and sexually with her penny-pinching and meek husband whom she had met while he was still in the military. It turns out that she has insatiable appetites. Unfortunately for the film, the emphasis is too much on Basehart's contrived plot to get even, though that has an unexpected and well-done twist to it, and not enough on the tawdry Audrey Totter. Is this her best film? I do not know, but it has to be up there. Not one to be restrained by the institution of marriage, she's no doubt had a few other affairs before she runs off with Lloyd Gough as Barney Deagher, a well-off liquor wholesaler who has a Malibu beach house and who later turns up dead. Cyd Charisse may have been a good dancer, but she waters down this film by being the good girl to make a stark comparison with Totter's character. Too bad because the film really could have been a darker and more interesting story if it had kept her out of it. I give it an 8 for Totter and Basehart, and a chance to see William Conrad.

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.