Though much less stylish to look and (and listen to), The Glass Web owes a debt to Michael Curtiz' The Unsuspected of six years earlier. Both movies take as their principal setting a live true-crime show the earlier in the waning days of radio, the latter in the dawning of the television era. And both make use of the technology of their respective mediums to help unravel their plots.
Head writer of the crime show John Forsythe and researcher Edward G. Robinson are at loggerheads; Robinson finds Forsythe callow and slapdash while Forsythe dismisses Robinson, a former police reporter, as an old fussbudget. Both men, however, are carrying on with the same woman, a Los Angeles television actress ( Kathleen Hughes) whose interest in them is entirely mercenary apart from the professional advancement she schemes for, she's always got a hand out for `loans,' which then escalate into blackmail.
When she turns up strangled in her apartment, there's little weeping or gnashing of teeth. Robinson proposes turning the solving of her murder into their season-ending cliffhanger, sure to cinch a skittish sponsor. Both he and Forsythe turn in competing scripts; one of them, however, contains details which could have been known only to the killer....
Set in the world of early television, The Glass Web looks and feels like early television. But upon its release it was part of the early-1950s Hollywood panic over the upstart rival medium, and featured one of the desperate gimmicks calculated to lure viewers back into theaters: 3-D. Fortunately, the projectiles that got early spectators ducking in their seats are confined to a few intense spates and today look rather quaint (even in 3-D, they'd look quaint). Director Jack Arnold went on to make at least two movies that have been enshrined as camp classics: The Incredible Shrinking Man and High School Confidential. The Glass Web is nowhere near so memorable, but it's diverting enough in a don't-expect-much kind of way.
