La toile d'araignée

Richard Widmark is a psychiatrist in "The Cobweb," also starring Lauren Bacall, Lillian Gish, Charles Boyer, John Kerr, Susan Strasberg and Gloria Grahame. It's quite a cast, especially when you realize that they were directed by Vincent Minnelli.

It's an absorbing story of the patients and the doctors at a mental institution. Widmark has basically taken over from the troubled Boyer - though Boyer retains his title, Widmark's contract gives him more power. Bacall, a recent widow, is a doctor on staff, and Lillian Gish is an administrator. The patient most focused on is Stevie, played by John Kerr. He is making good progress with his recovery, and in fact, some of the better patients are given control over designing their lounge. The sticking point becomes the draperies which become a political football. Widmark's wife, Gloria Grahame, wants to impose herself onto the institution that is taking her husband away from her by working with a board member on the drapes; Lillian Gish wants to save money and go the cheap route; and the patients have their own ideas.

This is a very good drama with good acting from all involved. Grahame is a brunette here and has never been more beautiful, plus she gets to wear some beautiful clothes. She, along with the others, gives a terrific performance.

The one with the best role is Lillian Gish, and she is fantastic. What an actress and what a career. Who could have believed she could play such a perfect bitch? Well worth watching if the plot is a little thin.

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.

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.

Minnelli's "The Cobweb" explores the fascinating, disturbing idea of a mental institution where the personal quirks of the staff and their families unwittingly have an impact on the patients. In Minnelli's films, his neurotic, lonely, unsettled characters always lead to some climactic nightmarish outburst (even the musicals), but here the whole movie is really a neurotic outburst. Amazingly, it all snowballs out of seemingly the most trivial decision: the new draperies.

What's interesting is that there is no antagonist; like "Howards End" or Eastwood's "Unforgiven", all the characters do bad things for understandable reasons and thus construct the cobweb. This compares favorably with other nuthouse movies, especially ones about the group therapy system--"Cuckoo's Nest" (based on Ken Kesey's novel of 1950, 5 years before "Cobweb") and "The Caretakers" with Joan Crawford as the inflexible head nurse. Those films tend to focus on patients having hysterics and running riot. They don't indict the system but one despotic individual within it (a head nurse); Kesey's narrator claims that she represents a larger controlling force but even then shows that other wards in the hospital are not the same. However, "Cobweb" takes a more subtle nobody's-fault approach that ultimately has wider, darker implications. It implies that these pitfalls are endemic to the system because they are part of human nature, which is a more sinister idea (especially for the 50s) than being able to blame a convenient mini-Hitler. Therefore, it works more convincingly as a microcosm of a society that thinks it's healthy. It's also more salutary and hopeful than those films because it proceeds from this clear-eyed cautionary assessment.

In the true sense of "melodrama," it underlines apparently innocuous early scenes with heavy foreboding music by Leonard Rosenman. It's also astonishing to watch Lillian Gish play a b----. And she does a great job.

MGM put together quite a stellar cast for The Cobweb, another film in the tradition of Private Worlds and The Snake Pit about an insane asylum and the politics of running the place. After seeing this crowd at work, I'm not sure that the patients haven't taken over the place as they did in that classic Star Trek episode.

Richard Widmark is a new psychiatrist whose new methods allow granting of more freedom of the grounds to the inmates. What Widmark's character might think today of the number of patients walking around completely free today with only our trust that they will take their medications is interesting to speculate. Anyway it puts him at odds with Charles Boyer who is the medical head of the place.

Boyer is a man beset with problems of his own of a personal nature, he's drinking and wrenching around openly, a man going through a midlife crisis and playing it out in front of everyone including all the enemies he's made. Widmark however as a former disciple of his can't quite pull the trigger to get rid of him.

And Widmark is having his own problems, a neglected wife in Gloria Grahame and a fetching Lauren Bacall to tempt him.

But the best performance of the film comes from that grand old lady of the screen, Lillian Gish. She's the civilian record keeper of the place and a politician to the max. She plays off Widmark and Boyer, in fact The Cobweb would have been a better film had she been the central character. There's also a real good performance by Olive Carey as a Ratched like nurse, Ms. O'Brien.

John Kerr, Susan Strasberg, and Oscar Levant are all inmates of the place which is a rather posh establishment for the richer brand of neurotics. You can't imagine Widmark trying his experiments in freedom on the inhabitants of The Snake Pit.

The Cobweb is a film whose parts are greater than the whole effort. It could have been a whole lot better than it was given the talent involved.