Alicia I love this movie so much

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 1955 by Loew's Inc. New York opening at Loew's State: 5 August 1955. U.S. release: 15 July 1955. U.K. release: February 1956. Australian release: 24 October 1955. 11,125 feet. 124 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Tensions among the staff at a private mental clinic reach a crisis.NOTES: Film debuts of John Kerr and Susan Strasberg. Negative cost: approximately $2½ million. Initial domestic rentals gross: approx. $1½ million.COMMENT: The most difficult type of role to accomplish successfully, is one in which a person conceals his or her true character under a false personality. Players cast in such roles, are faced with quite a problem. They must act convincingly enough to dupe their fellow- players, and yet unconvincingly enough to reveal their true characters to the audience. There are many examples of outstanding portrayals of this kind — Pierre Blanchar in "Symphony Pastoral", Gloria Grahame in "Human Desire", Mary Murphy in "Hell's Island", Edmond O'Brien in "The Barefoot Contessa" (for which he deservedly won an Academy Award). The latest example is admirably executed by one of the world's foremost actors, Charles Boyer, in "The Cobweb".Boyer provides a fascinating study of a once-brilliant psychiatrist, now a deteriorated man. Nominal head of a clinic for nervous disorders, he hides his gross inefficiency, his moral corruption, his cowardice, his deception and his cunning, beneath a bogus charm. Ironically, by too zealous an application to his work, his own mind has become so warped, that besides wrecking his own life and that of his wife, he now begins to wreck the lives of the people he seeks to assist.Secretary of the Clinic, is Victoria Inch, a vain, insolent, brawling, commandeering, middle-aged spinster, determined to be on the winning side of any quarrel. Interested solely in herself, she has no regard whatever for the feelings of other people, least of all the patients in her care. This role is superbly portrayed by veteran, Lillian Gish.Oscar Levant is excellent in his characterization of a patient who discourages others, in order to increase his own sense of importance. Newcomer, John Kerr, either lacks experience or natural acting ability. His performance may depend entirely on the work of ace director, Vincente Minnelli.Minnelli has a flair for satirical character-sketches. That's why he excels in his treatment of Miss Inch. Watch out for the scene in her home, between herself and Richard Widmark. Notice, also, the talkative bore who makes a nuisance of himself at the patients' meetings, the two ambulance men on the river-bank, the loutish types in the picture-theater, etc.The film's only defect is its rather pat conclusion. All the plots are nicely straightened out to the complete satisfaction of the box- office. Even Miss Inch's heart is touched. In spite of this one shortcoming, the picture is nevertheless quite absorbing and certainly well worth seeing.

Bob Taylor 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.

tommorg Between the stilted family trauma given as back story and the spoiled brats in Richard Widmark's rat pack, it's no wonder that the shrinks sling drugs at these whiners today. Perhaps this form of psychotherapy (considered the top drawer treatment of the era) should be resurrected, maybe the 'family unit' scenario is called for in this world of today where innocence has been totally lost. Now that neurosis (at least) is accepted in our society, the problems of these people seem mildly absurd. Perhaps it's a farce and I was just too dense to get it. Interesting dynamic between the shrink and his wife: in 2014 she'd get lawyered up and take him for everything he's worth. Bacall is sultry and beautiful as always. It's amazing that she could do a movie like this, as Bogart, if he wasn't already deceased, had to be very very ill.

jzappa There is an element of escapism in Minnelli's penchant for melodrama, and joy is the voice of the escaped psyche, but he hasn't quite released himself from his frustrations with reality, as they are all over his melodramas, disparaged by the atonal brasses from composer Leonard Rosenman. Like Minnelli's Hollywood melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful, his 1955 film The Cobweb depicts the indoor routine of a secluse, insulated group of people, and like the former, it focuses on professional careers atoning for emotional hang-ups, particularly isolated, disheartened home lives. In a sense, the film follows the quest for the perfect family. The film's effect relies on the acute lucidity with which the audience can relate to the characters. The Cobweb becomes a personal film for Minnelli in more manners than one.The psychiatric environment embodies a disparaging enthrallment for Minnelli, after years of shepherding Judy through myriad institutions. The curious scenario, and some of the characters, strike a unity, playing to the inner pretentious aesthete in us all. The animosity between the clinic's patients and the bickering personnel detonates over a presumably frivolous decorative issue, the choice of new drapes for the lounge. Though for an epicure like Minnelli, the matter is invariably not frivolous but crucial. Furnishings express not only ornamental but more deep-seated conscientious matters as well.Richard Widmark plays a clinical psychiatrist stuck between his household family of his wife Karen and their two children, and the makeshift family that he propagates in his clinic with self-motivated staff worker Lauren Bacall, and agitated teenage artisan John Kerr. Widmark and Bacall ask Kerr to create new drapes for the clinic's library as a healing activity, not knowing that Gloria Grahame, Widmark's frustrated wife, and a stately administrator at the clinic played with bureaucratic bustle by Lilian Gish, have already taken charge of doing it. This unfolding intrigue conveys considerable labyrinthine kindred, civil, and administrative warfare. Reproach flourishes in the forms of the artist as refugee, profession as rectification for private disenchantment, the grind between cultivating one's identity at the cost of solitude and the compulsion to follow and synthesize into a comprehensive society.The clinic on screen doesn't parallel any specific or incidentally real institution. The group scenes play out like Minnelli's usual party scenes, a neurotic congregation of loose-lipped free-thinkers and recoiling self-observers, boldly highlighted by Charles Boyer's admirably self-effacing performance. He is an actor utterly sure of himself and needs no abstract means of support. And no matter how many times one has heard thoughts expressed by however many people, Lauren Bacall always makes them sound original. Thus The Cobweb is not impaired by a lack of realism but embellished by a uniquely expressionistic blend of tones.The movie's household scenes are more horrific than those at the clinic. Many couples will identify strongly with the arguments between Grahame, who believes her husband is implying malicious affronts, and Widmark, who never says anything to his wife that means anything but exactly what he's saying. Widmark is not giving a wooden portrayal of a sensitive man but a sensitive portrayal of a man who is not bothered by much. Conversely, Grahame famously said, "It's not how I looked at a man; it was the thought behind it." I believe her, because she plays Widmark's wife as someone unhappy with who she is and what she has because her mind is scattered and she is not content with thinking.It's a nugget of blackly hilarious, embroidered reality that indicates the immediate misanthropy about family life in the flush 1950s, and how many American marriages persist in self-insulated conditions to this day with similar results. Note this bit between a patient and his psychiatrist: "Your'e supposed to be making me fit for normal life. What's normal? Yours? If its a question of values, your values stink. Lousy, middle-class, well-fed smug existence. All you care about is a paycheck you didn't earn and a beautiful thing to go home to every night." Or the fleeting brush between Grahame and Kerr, in which they consider the connotations of flowers.