Oh, yes. Tincture of murder makes the medicine go down easier. I’ll have to remember that for the future.
When it comes to it, Tension (1949) has plenty of it, but the one thing it lacks is the sympathetic character who pays the price of the bad decisions of the balance of grasping, unprincipled cads in this wannabe member of film noir.
After all, who’s to like here? Warren Quimby, war vet and now a humble pharmacist, will do anything to keep his wife, Claire, by his side, and I do mean anything, including losing his self-respect.
But Claire has no respect for her husband, who’s working 12 hour nights to provide for her and build a future. No, she wants it all now, in her selfish way, and she’s more than willing to go out on dates with likely looking future husbands if they flash the cash.
But her pick for a successor to Warren, Barney Deager, just beats up Warren when he comes to remonstrate with Claire to respect the sanctity of marriage. Now he’s whipped by her and him. And we don’t like any of them.
Hell, even Warren’s assistant, Freddie, recommends cold-blooded murder when Warren tells him of the beating. He seemed like a nice guy – up to then…
And now that Warren has everyone convinced that he’s given up on Claire, he concocts a master murder plan involving a new identity: a man who’ll be little more than a ghost; a man who’ll one night murder Barney for the temerity of stealing Warren’s wife, all while Warren is working at his pharmacy. The new identity, named Paul Sothern, will be little more than smoke on the wind, having an imagined career, an apartment, and lots of travel.
And one unanticipated adjunct: Paul Sothern acquires a girlfriend.
When push comes to shove, Quimby cum Sothern stands over the sleeping Deager, and finds himself incapable of the deed. He walks away after some biting remarks concerning relationships with Claire. It may be rhetorical murder, but it’s not the same thing as what comes next: Deager’s death by gunshot.
And then the fun begins. Unfortunately, the girlfriend, despite having a photo of Paul, is not utilized enough to give us better insight into the dark motivations of the other characters, and Quimby’s failure to viciously off the man who has cuckolded him doesn’t make him emblematic of a true noir movie. Still, the plot twists kept our interest, and there’s plenty of tension IF you can find a way to hook into this motley crew. Even the police aren’t real winners, being a little too uninterested in legal niceties.
But it is a lot of fun speculating on just who took the life of the relatively innocent Deager.
