The Cobweb (1955)

Richard Widmark. Gloria Grahame. Lauren Bacall. Sounds like a grade-A film noir or mystery. Not to mention Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish, Paul Stewart, Susan Strasberg and Oscar Levant. What could go wrong?How about an overlong talkfest where nothing much happens at a 50's- Hollywood style mental hospital that's more like a resort hotel for middle-class white folks who each have some minor tic they keep repeating over and over? And the key issue of the plot is which of three contending parties will get to choose the new drapes. Also a couple of suggestions of adultery that never reach fruition.The staff members as well all keep hitting the same note over and over in this tedious script. You begin to fell sorry for the cast, particularly poor Gloria Grahame as the clinic director's wife, required to keep throwing tantrums over nothing.There is a touch of mystery to the film. Why did MGM feel obliged to drag this slight material out to over two hours and film it in color and Cinemascope?

Very disappointing film with Charles Boyer terribly miscast as a therapist in an institution who has lost his self-respect.We know that there are debates regarding how much autonomy patients should have in these places. The main thrust of the film is about hanging up draperies. I haven't heard that term since the woman portraying Mamie Eisenhower in the fabulous "Backstairs at The White House" correcting the maid for using the term drapes instead of draperies.Richard Widmark, as the other therapist, is good here but the material, excuse the pun, does him in as well in a poor script. Gloria Grahame, as his frustrated, neglected wife, is also good.The film does show that both therapists need help for their own problems. The real star here is Lillian Gish, as the neglected, devoted worker trying her very best to assert herself. Gish portrays an anxious spinster who is really unable to cope.This is certainly not "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

... ha ha. I actually was compelled to comment here and say that this movie isn't just about changing curtains in a mental hospital, as most reviewers have exaggerated. I hope you aren't deterred from watching it now... Personally, I felt that this sub-plot was comparatively less compelling than the other plot-lines, and was a weak device to tie the characters together- Why would the psychiatrist's wife have such a vested interest in picking the style of curtains, for example? I can believe her underlying motives, but the representation seemed forced. I certainly recommend watching this movie; there are many good scenes for the few clunky ones; and the acting and Minnelli's direction ameliorate anything (fans of 50's melodrama are very forgiving); but, with a scenario as loony as this, it couldn't possibly live up to the promise of its premise, and achieve the same transcendental, lurid grace of, say, a 'Written on the Wind', and so, it is a next to intermediate Minnelli film, a next to intermediate subversive 50's Hollywood film, and a next to intermediate melodrama.

A rather curious film directed by Vincent Minelli, who always was a perfectionist with his sets and actors,I am confounded as to what his inference with the drapes as metaphor;at the end patient John Kerr uses them as a blanket to get a good nights sleep.Lauren Bacall,always an interesting presence,is a young widow and psychiatrist working at an elite institution (I assume a take on the Karl Menninger Institute in Topeka Kansas).Psychotherapy was at the height of its popularity in this era, it was almost "de rigor" for creative wealthy people to enter an elite institution,even when often there was very little wrong with them,other than needing a dose of real life.Richard Widmark as the clinic director is quite interesting, even as his marriage to Gloria Grahame is falling apart and he becomes interested in Bacall.The drapes, and who will re-design them for the library is the primary theme here, strangely.Widmark remarks to the clinic patients that they are attempting to run a cooperative society,and this is clearly difficult.However it is difficult not because of the patients,but the doctors and their drama.Overall an interesting curiosity,I infer that Minelli was making a commentary on the overwhelming popularity of psychoanalysis in Hollywood, at the time.8/10.