Tension

Tension holds up extremely well as an unusual (if not exactly rare) example of film noir from MGM. Its virtues mostly lie in the work of director John Berry and the cast, especially Richard Basehart in a difficult leading role, as a man pushed right to the edge, but not permanently or lastingly crossing over into homicidal rage. He's convincing enough in every aspect of the role, yet sympathetic enough to bring this off; meanwhile, Audrey Totter, as his slutty wife, is downright sinister and sadistic from the get-go, and therein lies the only real flaw in the foundation of the movie. Even allowing for the notion that their marital union took place in the wake of the Second World War, amid a lot of relief and also lots of personal dislocation, one has to wonder how these two characters ever came to be married, and what each ever could possibly have seen in the other? But beyond that, they're just fine in the parts as written, with Totter as manipulative as any of Don Siegel's most notorious leading ladies (Faith Domergue in The Duel at Silver Creek, Angie Dickinson in The Killers) and, indeed, playing the diametric opposite of the loyal and loving spouse that she portrayed in Robert Wise's The Set-Up that very same year. Berry also does a superb job of juggling the other elements, especially the two police detectives played by Barry Sullivan and William Conrad, with some highly realistic and beguiling bits of business between them as they go through their investigation. The only flaw in the details of the execution is the score by Andre Previn; Previn would later write some good jazz material and establish himself as a classical composer as an adjunct to his conducting career, but the music here is little better than hack work, following conventions to such a degree that every cue is practically telegraphed in advance. Watching it more than a half century on, one can marvel at how well the movie still holds together in all the right places, which is 90 percent of it -- Berry and cinematographer Harry Stradling even working some of Cyd Charisse's dancing and athletic abilities into one scene that plays comically but proves key to the plot a half-hour later -- but one also wishes that the MGM music department would have assigned a composer such as Miklos Rozsa to do the scoring on Tension. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide