Cobweb, The (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Vincente MinnelliRelease Date(s)
1955 (July 29, 2025)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
A real dud from director Vincente Minnelli, The Cobweb (1955) is a soapy all-star color and CinemaScope drama set at a psychiatric clinic, where, predictably, the staff is nearly as mentally unbalanced as their patients. (Physician—heal thyself!) The basic set-up is actually quite like Stanley Kramer’s Not As a Stranger, a similarly all-star drama about medical students and doctors. Kramer’s film is far more entertaining and dramatically sound, if likewise dated in some respects. That film was released barely two weeks prior to The Cobweb and was a huge success ($6.2 million in U.S. and Canadian rentals against a budget of just $1.5 million), despite lacking both CinemaScope and color. Conversely, The Cobweb flopped, earning $1.97 million, which is about what it cost to make. Factoring in prints and advertising, MGM recorded a loss of $1.141 million. Somehow, Gloria Grahame managed to appear in both films.
Based on the novel of the same name by William Gibson, The Cobweb was conceived by Minnelli as a much longer picture, running perhaps as long as 2 hours and 40 minutes, but MGM whittled it down against Minnelli’s wishes (and without his participation) to a still-overlong 124 minutes. This probably accounts for some of its herky-jerky plotting, but much of the needless confusion it generates seems to have been the fault of Minnelli and screenwriters John Paxton and, credited with additional dialogue, William Gibson.
The story is set at a psychiatric clinic in Riverwood, Nebraska, a sprawling estate that resembles the front entrance to Disneyland. The too-casual nature of the clinic allows the patients to come and go as they please, even wander into a nearby town to go to the movies. (What, no curfew?) Further, in a grievous error of basic movie storytelling, in the early scenes it’s impossible for the viewer to distinguish the patients from the clinic’s staff; only the nurses wear uniforms. An early meeting of both patients and staff is befuddling: it’s chaired by Mr. Holcomb (Edgar Stehli), who acts like a staff member, but who was seen near the beginning of the film apparently attempting suicide (an act never referred to again, though Stehli does wear a bandage). Meg Rinehart (Lauren Bacall) sits among the clinic’s patients, but she turns out to be a clinic employee, though it’s never clear just what her job is. Activities director, maybe? (And, yes, activities include basket weaving.) And since most of the staff at the clinic have mental health issues of their own, the confusion The Cobweb generates delays its audience becoming involved in its story and characters.
At the heart of things is Dr. Stewart McIver (Richard Widmark), director of the clinic though, adding yet more needless confusion, he allows former director Dr. Douglas Devanal (Charles Boyer) to pretend that he’s still in charge, creating problems later on. Too much screen time is devoted to one of the most overworked contrivances in the movies: McIver is so dedicated to his patients that his wife, Karen (Grahame) is growing increasingly frustrated that he’s never home, never tending to her needs. One horribly clichéd scene has her all dressed up to go to a concert he’s completely forgotten about and for which he has no time for anyway. Such sequences are reworked verbatim in hundreds of other films, e.g., Burt Lancaster and Dana Wynter in Airport, to name one.
Such relationships in movies only work when a) the dedicated physician/whatever’s cause is clearly greater than their personal lives, and he truly can’t get away; and, b) when the unhappy wife has reasonable cause to be upset. But, here, she’s simply too shrill, too selfish with his time and, further, while the script has McIver spending his brief pitstops at home doting over the kids (Tommy Rettig and Sandra Descher), she all but ignores their presence, making Karen extremely self-absorbed and unlikable. After a big fight, McIver can only offer his son this trite explanation: “People fight, sometimes.” Some healer.
However, the picture’s single biggest problem—one that teeters it dangerously toward high camp—is that the crux of its drama revolves around a highly-contested set of drapes. Yes, drapes. The clinic’s library needs new ones, and McIver is anxious to let the patients, particularly troubled artist Steven Holte (John Kerr) design the new drapes themselves, to give them a bludgeoningly symbolic sense of purpose. This puts McIver and the patients at odds with shrewish, penny-pinching control freak administrator Victoria Inch (a wildly miscast Lillian Gish), who wants to buy discounted drapes from James Petlee (James Westerfield), while Karen, in wanting to play a bigger role in her husband’s work life, has ordered a pricey set of drapes on her own. All this hysteria over drapes creates such a fuss; Minnelli plays it like the fate of the world hinges on who wins the Battle of the Drapes.
Because so much of the film focuses on McIver’s unhappy marriage and the political maneuvering over the drapes, the patients suffering because of it, combined with MGM’s deletions to Minnelli’s original cut, what’s left is a smattering of unsatisfying character vignettes, such as the burgeoning relationship between agoraphobic Sue Brett (Susan Strasberg, like Kerr, a screen debut) and suicidal Steven. In an almost sadistic bit of casting, famously troubled genius Oscar Levant plays similarly troubled Mr. Capp, but his screen time is so abbreviated, one can’t help but feel sorry for the pianist and composer, so hilarious in The Band Wagon just two years before. Way, WAY down on the billing of actors, Levant looks a decade older and quite unwell. Others, like Fay Wray (as Boyer’s wife), and Paul Stewart (as a doctor) must have had most of their scenes cut.
Note: The IMDb claims Gene Kelly makes a cameo appearance about 10 minutes into the film. That’s wrong—it’s definitely not him.
The Cobweb was shot in early, 2.55:1 CinemaScope (before the addition of a mono optical track cut into the picture area). Warner Archive’s video transfer is excellent, despite inherent issues with the then still-new process (CinemaScope mumps, etc.). Some shots are still a little grainy or distorted but, all things considered, it looks impressive. And while MGM was experimenting with ugly alternate color processes, this is in standard Eastman Color, so the color palette looks natural. Minnelli makes full use of the screen shape, at times distractingly so, but for the most part adapts to the process well. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 stereo) is likewise impressive; Leonard Rosenman’s unusual musical score comes off particularly well. The disc itself is Region-Free.
Supplements are limited to two shorts, the Tom & Jerry cartoon The Egg and Jerry (in CinemaScope also), and Salute to the Theaters, a two-reel commercial not unlike MGM’s shameless self-promotional television series of the time, with staged behind-the-scenes footage from this, Jupiter’s Darling, and Love Me or Leave Me.
For its cast and director, and for Warner Archive’s impressive video transfer, The Cobweb is worth seeing once, but it’s no Not As a Stranger.
- Stuart Galbraith IV