Barry Sullivan

Tension

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Claire and husband Warren

If you’re buying Tension as a “physical”, it often comes packaged together on DVD or Blu-ray with Where Danger Lives, as if it were a makeweight. Strange, since it’s a cracking film in terms of plot and character. Ostensibly designed as a vehicle for Audrey Totter, it ended up with Richard Basehart’s name first in the billing – studio reasons – though in all honesty it’s Barry Sullivan who’s the standout here, excellent though Totter and Basehart are. She plays the femme fatale who’s somehow wound up married to sappy and dutiful drugstore manager Warren Quimby but who’s carrying on a not-so-secret affair with local tough guy Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough), a believer in … Read more

Suspense

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Belita and Barry Sullivan stare into each other's eyes in a publicity shot

Film noir on ice! Suspense is a bit of a mess and the critics didn’t like it much when it came out in 1946. But the years have added a touch of fairy dust and there’s enough in here to entertain and delight, plus some decent performances, fine noirish lighting and a sense of paranoia towards the end so intense it’s almost as if Franz Kafka had a hand in things. In short it’s the story of a drifter who gets a job on an ice show and then falls for the boss’s wife, who is the show’s star attraction. At a certain point the boss disappears under an avalanche, leaving the way … Read more

The Gangster

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Barry Sullivan poses as Shubunka

There aren’t that many films called The Gangster, which is odd considering how many gangster movies there are. But here he is, this singular malefactor, in a film noir from 1947, a strange one with a weird, distorting-mirror quality. Too arty for its own good seems to have been the general consensus at the time. I have no idea what any of those complaints are about. The odd art deco clock and building frontage to one side, there’s not much artiness going on here at all – director Gordon Wiles isn’t messing about overly with the narrative. DP Paul Ivano gives it to us fairly straight in terms of lenses and lighting. Dalton … Read more

Forty Guns

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Barbara Stanwyck dressed in black

The French New Wave directors loved a bit of auteur machismo and they loved Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns, a tough, lean and smart western with lots to say and a pitiless logic that’s very un-Hollywood. Do not expect a happy ending. It’s filmed in CinemaScope and Fuller lets us know that immediately. Right after the 20th Century-Fox fanfare and before the opening credits there’s an opening shot of a massively wide panorama, followed by the entrance of a woman in black riding on a white stallion and in her thundering wake 40 (ish) men also on horseback. We have met Jessica Drummond, played by Barbara Stanwyck, the local rancher who is the alpha … Read more