Suspense

The was the biggest budget film ever for Monogram Pictures and it is evident in this very well produced nightclub noir from 1946. British skating star known as BELITA was the queen of Monogram for a few years and the money spent on her 40s musicals LADY LET'S DANCE and SILVER SKATES proved what an asset she truly was. The reviews for LADY famously declared: "Mega budget time on poverty row" - with half a dozen extravagant big band music sequences with herself zipping about in all sorts of incredible costumes. SUSPENSE made in '46 is almost the same story as GILDA made the same year at Columbia. However Rita couldn't skate and Belita wasn't Rita. but, in it's own way SUSPENSE is an excellent thriller with some of the most bizarre and creepy scenes I have seen in a 40s noir drama. The best of which actually occurs in a dance-skate number which I can only describe as: set imagery from Salvador Dali mixed with a quite obvious S&M costume design (spangly scimitars on Belita's bosom, black hot-pants, cape and stockings (!) and a horror stunt involving a doorway of jagged wiggly iron swords (yes the jaws of death) that our gorgeous lead actress must skate towards and jump through..... backwards! All to a pulsating kettledrum gonging away. Imagine being in the front row for that! Producers, King Bros were rewarded at Monogram by massive ($4m+) USA rentals from DILLINGER in 1945 and the head office put up a handsome budget for this film. It cost $1.1m, a record spend for Monogram and put the studio in the A league for a while. Following a stream of noir successes like THE GANGSTER Monogram stepped up a few rungs on the Hollywood ladder and changed their name to ALLIED ARTISTS. They used these strong profits to make IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE, FRIENDLY PERSUASION in '56 and in the 70s, went on to produce CABARET and THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. The skating dance shows in SUSPENSE are very spectacular and it is a quite a surprise how big and crowded the nightclub sets are. the penthouse scenes are 10 years ahead of Forbidden Planet in their snazzy moderne style. This is a good film, unjustly neglected. And Belita deserves to be rediscovered before she skates off into the sunset: apart from being a genuine astonishing beauty, she can act, skate and give lip service in that most attractive slovenly way that saw Bacall snare Bogey. Belita can do that and skate too. What a doll! For fans of all things kitsch, the nightclub is the same one seen in 1980 in XANADU ooooooo-h-oooo.

1946's "Suspense" was another step toward respectability for Poverty Row's Monogram Pictures, soon upgrading its higher budgeted films with the new Allied Artists emblem. Moving up the Hollywood ladder (his eighth feature), Barry Sullivan is well suited for the part of sleazeball Joe Morgan, who lucks into a managerial position for an ice show run by Frank Leonard (Albert Dekker), starring Leonard's beautiful wife Roberta (top billed Belita). Morgan immediately takes an interest in Mrs. Leonard, and when her husband finds out, tries to shoot his rival in the snow covered mountains of the High Sierras, resulting in an avalanche that seemingly buries Mr. Leonard. Although seemingly widowed, Roberta is reluctant to continue the ice show, convinced that Frank may not have died after all (only his cap and gun were found in the snow). Belita, whose career was unfortunately brief, proves herself a capable actress, and would again co-star opposite Barry Sullivan in a similar title, "The Gangster." Eugene Palette completed a Western for Republic ("In Old Sacramento") before retiring from Hollywood, while former Nancy Drew Bonita Granville threw in the towel after six more films, confining herself to television thereafter, going on to produce the popular LASSIE series ('Bonita' is Spanish for 'beautiful'). Other familiar faces abound- George E. Stone, Leon Belasco, Nestor Paiva, George Chandler, Byron Foulger, and 7 year old Billy Gray ("The Day the Earth Stood Still," FATHER KNOWS BEST), in one of his earliest roles. Definitely a noir, occasionally slowed by its numerous (if well done) skating scenes and romantic entanglements, a curious non horror title to appear four times on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater: Mar 14 1970 (followed by 1969's "It's Alive!"), May 8 1971 (followed by 1967's "Those Fantastic Flying Fools"), Apr 22 1972 (preceded by 1965's "The Eye Creatures"), and May 18 1974 (followed by 1965's "Night Caller from Outer Space").

A very trippy film noir.

Noiristas, make this a must because it has an inventive approach to it's noir story. Plenty of ice skating, rumba music and lions. The leading lady, Belita, is a treat. Barry Sullivan is superb. My favorite Sullivan performance.

Director Frank Tuttle and his cinematographer Karl Struss provide plenty of visual panache to make up for writer Philip Yordan's so-so script.

Yordan does deliver plenty of great noir lines for the actors to chew on.

I've seen Suspense three times now and appreciate it a little more each time. It's weird. I'm recommending a freaking ice skating noir.

It's hard living up to such a broad yet existential title as SUSPENSE; but the very beginning does it perfectly... albeit lasting only several seconds as an armed woman, flanked by two goons, aims her pistol at a ratty-looking fella, and then fires... hitting a target and winning the teddy bear prize, handed over by her "victim" working the stand...

Who then gives homeless-looking loser Barry Sullivan's Joe Morgan directions to an ice skating rink/auditorium... and what follows are the best sequences as Sullivan talks his way from being a popcorn vendor to security guard to practically running the show by making it more dangerous and thus... suspenseful...

Of course being a Noir he soon falls head-over-heels for a taken woman, and that's where real life ice skating champ Belita, married to the always-menacing Albert Dekker, comes in... she's the showcase star and he's the wealthy, enigmatic owner... and we eventually learn that Sullivan's quick climb was for reasons other than his fast-talking charm...

A shame since his character needed more spontaneous con artistry since, once he and Belita realize they're both equally smitten with each other... despite her husband's deadly intentions and a shady dame from the past (Bonita Gransville)... SUSPENSE, directed by THIS GUN FOR HIRE Frank Tuttle, in becoming a full-blown sport-propaganda/romantic melodrama, leaves those initial crime-genre origins on ice.

My God, Bosley Crowther's an idiot. The one thing in this good noir from scenarist Phil Yordan and director Frank Tuttle that the former New York Times critic liked, namely the ice skating stuff, is the one thing in the film that is truly ordinary. Everything else is either better than expected (i.e. Belita's acting) or fairly compelling (i.e. Barry Sullivan and Eugene Palette's performances). And while the film did not, ironically, contain much suspense it had plentiful supplies of darkness and disturbance courtesy of Yordan's terse dialogue and Tuttle's three AM of the soul direction. Indeed, the general Woolrichian look and feel of the film has caused me to want to view more of this unknown director's work (only film of his that I can recall viewing is "This Gun For Hire" with Ladd/Lake, which I also liked). Give it a B.

PS...Wonder why Barry Sullivan never made it (in movies, that is) while less talented contemporaries with the same look, like Stack, Mature and Wilde, did?