The Cobweb (1955)
The recent death of actor John Kerr, at 81 on February 2nd, got me thinking about the film in which he made his screen debut, soon after he had made his Broadway splash in Tea and Sympathy (directed by Elia Kazan) for which he won the 1954 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, The Cobweb belongs to the director’s group of color, wide-screen contemporary melodramas of the 1950s and ’60s, and, no, it is not one of the best (those would be Some Came Running and Home from the Hill). But it certainly is memorable, what you might call a one-of-a-kind (thank God) curiosity.
The Cobweb is a movie about drapes, perhaps the only movie about drapes. The drapes are those in the library of a swell psychiatric clinic; the drama derives from who gets to pick the new ones. Yes, the conflict over the drapes represents all the power struggles and inner demons of those concerned, patients and staff and spouses alike, but everyone surely does talk an awful lot about those drapes. Minnelli is the likeliest director of a movie about curtains: who loved screen decor more than he did? What other director was as likely to obsess over drapes as much as these characters? But the drama remains on the surface of the fabrics involved, never coming off as anything more than overwrought and absurd. Clearly the intent was to create a fascinating, complicated drama unleashed by the seemingly harmless need for new drapes. The result is garish camp. But with an all-star cast.
Central in the war of the drapes are Lillian Gish, the institution’s bitter, old-maidish administrator, and Gloria Grahame, the bratty wife of the joint’s progressive analyst (Richard Widmark). The dull leads are Widmark and sweet art-therapist Lauren Bacall. (As in the next year’s Written on the Wind, in which Dorothy Malone got all the fun stuff to do, Bacall plays a blah second-fiddle to supposedly supporting player Grahame.) It’s the rare bad performance from Gish (in the same year she was so indelibly great in The Night of the Hunter), distressingly caricatured and over the top. Grahame is impossibly phony, reteamed with Minnelli after her Oscar-winning work in his far, far superior The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), in which she was every bit as superficial. Charles Boyer, as a psychiatrist, acts as if he knows he’s in a bomb. (Boyer had starred in this movie’s granddaddy, the early psychiatric drama Private Worlds [1935].)
Among the patients are Oscar Levant (his usual self), Susan Strasberg, and Mr. Kerr (who receives “introducing” billing). In the kind of role that might have been played by James Dean, Kerr proved to be no James Dean. (The Cobweb was released the same year as East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause, the year in which Dean died.) With his lack of sex appeal and his flat voice, Kerr is no breakout star, though his performance is one of the film’s least offensive. The presence of James Dean might have helped this picture considerably, given it a genuine jolt or two.
The Cobweb confuses whining with depth, and hysterics with drama. It’s both trashy and boring; it’s over two hours of people behaving stupidly. Despite Minnelli’s deservedly high reputation for his stunning use of color and inventive way with the wide screen, The Cobweb fails on both scores: it’s a brownish, static movie.
In 1956, Minnelli directed Kerr in the big-screen version of Tea and Sympathy, complete with Deborah Kerr, the play’s other star (and no relation to John). It was a big fat prestige project despite the expectedly ruinous influence of censorship on the final product, including an atrocious framing story that punished Deborah for her so-called sex therapy. It never was great material to begin with, and its “daring” treatment of sexuality is now extremely dated and offensive (just because John is sensitive doesn’t mean he’s, heaven forbid, “that way”). It’s as obvious and laughable in its way as The Cobweb is. Minnelli’s pair of films with John Kerr are visually disappointing and dramatically embarrassing low points in the career of a very great director. And the drapes are much better in his Madame Bovary (1949).
