The Cobweb
The Cobweb

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- 63/100 based on 1,992 votes

At an exclusive psychiatric clinic, the doctors and staff are about as crazy as the patients. The clinic head, Dr. Stewart McIver, thinks that it would be good therapy for his patients to design and make new drapes for the library. Mrs. Karen McIver, who is neglected by her hardworking husband (and a bit unbalanced herself), wants to make her mark on the clinic, so she orders new drapes. Miss Inch, the business manager, who has been with the clinic longer than anyone, sees th... (Full plot summary below)

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Actors in The Cobweb:

Richard Widmark
Lauren Bacall
Charles Boyer
Gloria Grahame
Lillian Gish
John Kerr

Full Plot Details

At an exclusive psychiatric clinic, the doctors and staff are about as crazy as the patients. The clinic head, Dr. Stewart McIver, thinks that it would be good therapy for his patients to design and make new drapes for the library. Mrs. Karen McIver, who is neglected by her hardworking husband (and a bit unbalanced herself), wants to make her mark on the clinic, so she orders new drapes. Miss Inch, the business manager, who has been with the clinic longer than anyone, sees this as an intrusion into her territory, and she too orders drapes. All this puts everyone in a dither, as they fight over drapes and clinic politics.

Review & Comments

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Movie Reviews

Classic Film and Television - 9/10 by Michael E. GrostStrange, unique look at mental asylum is both visually and dramatically brilliant.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews - 7/10 by Dennis SchwartzThe highlight of the film was Oscar Levant singing "Mother" while being sedated.
User Review - 10/10 by The Movie WAn absolute masterpiece experienced in all of its 35mm glory at the BAM tonight!
User Review - 8/10 by Joel KThere 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.
User Review - 8/10 by James RSOAP OPERA! Very Peyton Place-y. Where Peyton Place was set in a small-New England town -- this one is set primarily at a small-New England Mental Institution. Peyton Place also had up-and-coming and pin-up idols as most of it's cast -- The Cobweb uses all formidable actors and "method"-up-and-comers. The performances that John Kerr and Susan Strasberg put in are wonderful and reminiscent of James Dean and Julie Harris. But Richard Whitmark, Lauren Bacall (one of my favorites), Lillian Gish, and others all put in amazing performances. The real star and center of the film is Gloria Grahame. She shows off her acting chops very well as the forgotten, neglected, sexy wife. This film has to be released on DVD! It is right up there with Peyton Place and those small-town melodramas. A favorite of mine. Catch it on TCM -- but you can find copies on Ebay.
User Review - 6/10 by Sam DA complicated drama compounded only to drive you nuts. It must have been very popular in its day. Another lost flixster rating to boot.
User Review - 6/10 by Bill TTHE DRAPES! THE DRAPES! Won't someone think of THE DRAPES! Unbelievably cheesy drama about the wild goings on at an upscale mental hospital. Where it's Peyton-Place drama craziness reveals that, yes, the staff are probably crazier then the patients. Richard widmark tries to keep everyone sane, while doctors drink, have affairs, and just chew scenery any way they can. Lauren Bacall is seen taking a step back in almost every scene she's in. And yets, those drapes. Shit. What a movie.
User Review - 4/10 by jay nMuch Ado About Drapes!!!! I don't see the point of this Film....
User Review - 4/10 by Allan CTotally schmaltzy. Was that seriously a 2-hour movie about the trials and tribulations of hanging drapes in a mental institution common room?

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