- Rarely does a film's opening narration convey its underlying philosophy as clearly as in John Berry's excellent Tension. I'll let the narrator, Homicide Detective "Collie" Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan), make my point in his own words: "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."
- Initially, Collie and his partner (William Conrad) apply this tension to Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart), a bookish pharmacist suspected in the murder of flashy playboy Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough). Quimby's wife Claire (Audrey Totter) ran away with Deager a while back, and Deager even broke Quimby's glasses when he tried to take her back. It's no wonder that Collie suspects Quimby, particularly since he set up an alias, Paul Sothern, under which he had planned to murder Deager. It turns out that Quimby didn't do it in the end, but you can appreciate why Collie might apply tension to a suspect who spends about half the movie on the premeditation step of an intended murder.
- More interesting, however, is Collie's treatment of Claire, who doesn't have any obvious motive for murdering Deager since, after all, she ran off with him in the first place. The audience already knows that Claire isn't the most honest person, and Collie even mentions a file on her "that goes back further than you'd like to remember and up to where you wish you could forget." Still, that hardly justifies the fact that Collie starts wooing Claire in the hopes that she'll let down her guard and make a mistake. Although Collie admittedly mentioned "romance" as one of his patented detective techniques, the audience might rightly begin to wonder if he really would arrest Claire if it turned out she was guilty.
- In my book, Tension is probably most notable for the fact that the nominal hero of the story comes pretty close to murdering a man with a fishing trident. Quimby's loyal friend and employee Freddie (Tom D'Andrea) seems decent enough, as does his naive love interest (Cyd Charisse), but all of the major characters, from the amusingly manipulative Collie to the philandering Deager to the completely unrepentant Claire, come up rather short in the ethics department. Collie finally catches the real killer through a clever ruse involving an apartment's furniture that is later revealed to be a total lie. That's somehow fitting in a film where you can't even really root for the hero, let alone anybody else.
