Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

calvinnme The patients and staff of a mental hospital undergo a number of melodramatic moments as they all come to grips with their rather pedestrian mental health issues. Being an MGM motion picture production, the institution is not some grimy state run place that serves low cost meals and whose halls reek of urine and carbolic. Instead, this place is more like a country club/resort with all the amenities, a modern turn on the tres chic sanitarium run by Claude Rains in Now Voyager.Presiding over the institution is Charles Boyer as the director, but Richard Widmark has all the manic energy as the doctor trying new, less traditional methods on the residents. The most bizarre fact about this flick is that a large part of the plot hinges on which new drapes will be hung in the library - conventional ones or those based on the drawings of sensitive, shy but troubled patient John Kerr. There is lots of back and forth on this subject to the point of being unbelievable.Amid all the kerfuffle on the drapery question, Boyer tries some of his long in the tooth continental charm on attempting to seduce Widmark's wife, the sizzling hot Gloria Grahame. Needless to say, Boyer strikes out embarrassingly. Meanwhile Widmark, who is getting tired of Gloria, starts to have feelings for the activities lady, played by Lauren Bacall. Oscar Levant does his usual droopy eyed slightly melancholic shtick as one of the residents. Now this is the same act that Oscar does while playing piano and attending Parisian cocktail parties in other films, but here, for some reason, the same behavior lands him in a mental hospital.With all these pots boiling, the movie manages, against type, to finish up in a restrained manner, without anything exploding. A most unusual film for 50's MGM, or for MGM of any era previously.

Robert D. Ruplenas When this came up on TCM recently, I was driven to watch it out of sheer curiosity from the wildly disparate opinions expressed here. The most curious point was the oft-repeated opinion that the plot was about drapes. This is no more true than that Moby Dick is about a whale. The drapes are what Hitchcock referred to as the "mcguffin" (however you want to spell it) - a thing on which to hang the actual plot lines. In this case the varied interactions, neuroses and interpersonal problems of both staff and patients at a cutting edge mental institution are what the movie is about. I began watching out of curiosity but I was actually drawn into the movie by the character development and the interesting human dramas. The script is better than a lot of these comments would have you believe, and the cast is top notch - Boyer, Widmark, Gish, Bacall, etc., and of course Gloria Grahame, who is always a delight for the eye. Also worth mentioning is the wonderful colorful processing of those days, now sadly defunct, and the fascinatingly atonal score of Leonard Rosenman. The movie is well worth watching.

Panamint 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.

robertguttman As the great satirist Tom Leher once observed, "If people can't communicate then the very least that they should do is to shut up". "The Cobweb" is a perfect case in point. There's a tremendous amount of talk in this movie, but almost no communication. The plot revolves around the selection of new drapes for the library in a psychiatric hospital. However, it's the lack of communication in regard to that issue, and the complications ensuing therefrom, that form the crux of the story. Along the way it becomes clear that the staff are not all that much more well-adjusted than the inmates. They display a great deal of professional and personal jealousy, insecurity and frustration. But then, as the frustrated head of the Bullock household wisely observed in the classic screwball comedy film, "My Man Godfrey", "All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people." There are plenty of the right kind of people in "The Cobweb", among both the staff and the inmates.Directed by Vincent Minelli and featuring a first-rate cast (including one of the great stars of silent films, Lillian Gish), "The Cobweb" had all the elements to have become a really great movie. Nevertheless, somehow, it doesn't quite come off. Perhaps it's because the film is a little bit too talky. Perhaps the issue of which drapes to hang in the sanatorium library is a bit too minor and superficial to excite the viewer's attention. Nevertheless, if you haven't seen this one, give it a chance, it might just grab you.