La telarana

In the 1950's, Vincente Minnelli was making some of the strongest films in Hollywood. Pictures like Some Came Running and The Bad and the Beautiful were very strong and probing studies of American life; The Cobweb deserves to be considered alongside these great films. The tranquil world of a psychiatric clinic in the Midwest countryside (somehow I can see cows in the fields even though there aren't any) is disrupted by a power struggle between two strong-willed men: Dr McIver, a young man whose first important post this is, and Dr Devanal, who has spent more than 20 years at the clinic and seems to be burnt-out. A stiff-necked spinster, Victoria Inch, whose father had created the clinic does everything she can to aggravate the principals. The clash between old settled practices and innovative new ones is the subject of the film.

People fret about the drapes--well really they're only the trigger for the clash. I have the strong feeling that by leaving Chicago to settle in this back-water, McIver has made a mountain of trouble for himself. His wife Karen (splendid performance by Gloria Grahame) is experiencing severe boredom and frustration; she's a sensual romantic woman who is being ignored by her husband, who is trying to find romance with Meg Rinehart (a cool Lauren Bacall). The romantic disappointments of the main characters make this film work.

I can only figure ace director Minelli got this movie on assignment. Because however much drama is inherent in the screenplay, it gets drained by an uncharacteristically flat visual style. There are no close-ups to emphasize emotion. Instead, the camera remains impersonal regardless what's happening with the characters. Plus the actors basically walk through their parts, excepting a fiery Gish and Grahame. Then too, the scenes simply follow one another without heightening the various dramatic impacts. The overall result is to disengage the viewer from what's on screen, creating what amounts to a limp drama.

As I recall, the movie got promoted on the basis of its marquee cast, including the classic Lillian Gish making her first appearance in a number of years. The large number of names, of course, required the script be extended so that each star would get an appropriate amount of screen time. This results in a number of subplots and an over-stretched 2-hour-plus runtime, way more than the slender who's-going-to decide-the-draperies premise can sustain.

However, unlike most reviewers, I don't object to the running issue of the curtains, ridiculous as it sometimes seems. After all, this is an institution for troubled people including the staff, so they may well obsess over something seemingly as minor as a decoration. Then too, who makes the decision serves as a catalyst for bringing out the various unresolved conflicts among the residents. I just wish the surrounding drama was better written, acted, and directed. Certainly, the talent was there to do just that. Instead we're left with a film that remains obscure for good reason.

Two words spoken by a patient pretty much sum up this whole film, start to finish- "I'm phobic!". It's all phobia, neurosis and hysterics, so its kinda like watching a train wreck.

The main difference between patients and staff is that the patients seem more self aware, often knowing just what their problems are, in contrast to the staff who flounder in self ignorance while totally unaware of their own internal issues. Overall the film lacks much depth, maybe the depth was lost in the editing process, so that we are left with...well...mostly just drapes (at least four different sets of drapes by my count, if you include the originals that are to be replaced). Maybe the writers of this story had a drapery fetish? Strange, but you never know!

Lillian Gish and Gloria Grahame steal the movie and their performances are worth your viewing time. The whole movie is a guilty pleasure, as neither inmates nor staff seem to be in charge of this asylum. Its fun to watch as the wheels come off and the "Institute for Neurosis" descends into 1950's campy chaos.

Well what was that?! Cockamamie confection isn't even psychiatry lite just some nonsense that's all about the DRAPES!!!! Truly odd film is loaded with great actors and a ludicrous story.

How it ever got the green light from the studio is mystery number one, that Vincente Minnelli said okay to directing it is the second although that would explain why so many great actors allowed themselves to be involved.

Everybody gives overheated performances except Lauren Bacall who keeps a low-key dignity amongst the melodrama and Susan Strasberg offers a restrained quiet portrait of a shut-in who is making her first tentative steps towards reemerging into the world.

The rest of the players aim for the rafters to varying degrees from Richard Widmark's impassioned but distracted doctor who is merely agitated then there is Lillian Gish who chews a bit of scenery as a bitter spinster as well as many other respected actors who show little restraint.

The real standout though is Gloria Grahame as Richard's hot mess of a wife, she seems to realize how silly the whole thing is and pitches her performance to that tempo, she's jittery, flouncy and fun plus she looks great.

Laughable take on mental health but good for one fun viewing as a camp catastrophe.

This movie, based on a novel, was made when expensive private mental hospitals provided months or years of psychoanalytically-oriented treatment for small numbers of affluent patients. None of today's antipsychotic or mood-stabilizing pharmaceuticals was yet in use. (One scene shows a patient in a hydrotherapy tub - used for sedation.) Dr Devenal, when things are falling apart, ruefully looks at the book he has written – "The Theory and Practice of Milieu Therapy." This was an important movement in the 1950's, proposing that the patient community was a significant element of the treatment. Patient governments voted on many aspects of institutional life and even, at times, on treatment decisions that properly were the responsibility of professional staff. Conflict over new drapes seems today to be a foolish plot element, but, although exaggerated, it fit the context of the time.