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“It’s curtains for everyone…”

Sudarshan Ramani

“Color can do anything that black-and-white can.” – Vincente Minnelli.

“Red and green…[André] Derain died last fall in a hospital. You wouldn’t know who he was.”
“It happens I do! … A French painter. One of Les Fauves!”

“He died in a hospital…in a white bed, in a white room – doctors in white standing around – the last thing he said was ‘Some red…show me some red. Before dying I want to see some red and some green.’

The Cobweb is one of the stranger films of the 50s. The 50s being a strange period for American cinema overall, this is no mean achievement. The simple plot of this gothic-inspired drama is a bureaucratic tussle on the style of living room drapes in the common room of the Castlehouse Clinic for Nervous Disorders, which is the principal setting of this film. The film is identifiable today as a kind of proto-Altman ensemble film of multiple characters forming a mosaic of interlinked vignettes which form a larger tapestry. The film marks the first of Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas, a series of films that included later triumphs like Some Came Running, Home from the Hill, Lust for Life, Two Weeks in Another Town as well as smaller films like Tea and Sympathy, The Sandpiper, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and also the musical, Bells Are Ringing which fits more easily with his melodramas than films like The Band Wagon or The Pirate.

Of course the divide between the melodramas and the musicals is not entirely tenable. For one thing The Cobweb resembles Meet Me in St. Louis to a great degree. It shares with that film the DP George Folsey and like that film it attempts to portray a community instead of a few individuals. It shares with that film also an examination of childhood anxieties – it has a fascination for the grotesque that is anticipated in the famous Halloween sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis. Minnelli re-invented the musical with that film which was also his first in colour . With The Cobweb, he discovers CinemaScope, a crucial addition to his apparatus. The movement of the actors in this film, the fluidity of the tracking shots and the many extended takes also share much in common with the way Minnelli shoots musical numbers in Meet Me in St. Louis. Add that to the plot revolving around who gets to decide the new drapes in the library room and it’s easy to imagine how The Cobweb could be a musical. Minnelli of course plays it straight and serious and the film is all the more audacious for the fact that this serious approach works pretty well.

Perhaps the source for The Cobweb comes from Minnelli’s stated interest in adapting Maxim Gorky’s classic play The Lower Depths. This play is famous for its French adaptation by Jean Renoir(Les bas-fonds, 1936) and the dark, unremittingly bleak version by Akira Kurosawa (Donzoko, 1957). Minnelli stated, about the Gorky story, “I think there is beauty in that kind of squalor”. The play is set in a relief shelter about an underclass maintaining their spirit by falling into illusions of phony escape. The shelter of The Cobweb is considerably better furnished at least from the outside (John Kerr’s character Stevie says at one point, “you should see it from the inside…like the inside of a dead fish”). Yet one can say that the inner lives of these characters are squalid, showing how little financial stability, education, knowledge and material provide actual comfort and stability. Like Fassbinder’s 70s melodramas, they appear to simply direct people to more sophisticated traps.

This is of course a common Minnelli theme. One befitting that of a man who started as a designer of window displays before moving on to designing some of the most beautifully staged and most deeply felt musicals of all time. Minnelli’s films feature the conflict between surfaces and reality, the persistence of all kinds of illusions and the way they affect and determine the lives of his characters. One can say of course that this is the common theme of all film-makers, in some way or some form. What makes Minnelli so suited to this theme is the way his mise-en-scène is able to bring out this conflict. 

The way for instance that a decent upstanding father like Richard Widmark, tries to comfort his young son who is a troubled witness to his parents’ crumbling marriage. A simple scene of Widmark closing the lights reveals the darkness in the house, transforming the good father into a menacing figure.

A drama that deals with characters that have knowledge and experience of the functioning (or malfunctioning) of human behaviour has to create its own brand of tension. Minnelli plays this tension in the unusual casting of the film. Richard Widmark brings a great amount of pathos and vulnerability to his tough, dependable, and responsible psychiatrist. Charles Boyer who could have easily played the Widmark role in his younger years but what he plays is Douglas Devanal, a bloated a bloated self-parody, suggesting at times a quite despair that makes his character affecting, despite being, seemingly, the designated villain. When later in the film, Minnelli cuts to an insert of the title of Devanal’s thesis, it amounts to a statement of the film’s aesthetic manifesto.

The Cobweb is about characters being affected by their surroundings. The patients, John Kerr’s Stevie for instance is so powerfully sensitive that the slightest change triggers a breakdown. But the doctors are no less affected, involved as they are in their petty disputes and small grudges over the greater good of the clinic. Even the hero, Stewart McIver isn’t exempt from this “cobweb”. The Cobweb is in effect an anti-horror film. That is to say, rather than manufacture a frightening milieu that unites a group, a unit or a family to stave off an external threat, the film creates milieus – the clinic, the homes of the staff, which reveals the horror inside the very unit, group and family with no external threat to provide ready-made solutions to their conflicts. The decor does not express the emotions and tensions of the group, it rebounds and reflects the tensions on to the people who are unaware of their traps.

Kathleen Byron(Black Narcissus, left), Gloria Grahame (The Cobweb, right)

The film that resembled The Cobweb most is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. A film about a group of nuns trying and failing to establish a mission in the Himalayas, only to find the surroundings, sensual and beautiful and lush, opposed to their restrictive way of life. They in turn find themselves alienated from their own convictions throughout the course of the film.

The Cobweb focuses on a more subtle and everyday kind of alienation, but the manner in which the psychologists try and remain strong for their patients is challenged by their own failings and weaknesses in their personal lives. And of course Gloria Grahame, right before the key climax when she changes the drapes without warning like a thief in the night – is transparently channelling Kathleen Byron(image left).

A Short Discourse on Fake Happy Endings…

Douglas Sirk is the great German fim émigre, who made some of the most successful Hollywood melodramas of the 50s. This included Imitation of Life which remained the top grossing film for Universal Studios until 1970’s Airport. Some of his films, A Time to Love and A Time to Die was praised by Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma. Nevertheless it came as a surprise when the publication of Sirk on Sirk(edited by Jon Halliday) and other interviews published around this time revealed Sirk to be a serious intellectual. One who thought deeply about the effects of his films, and moreover conscious of the traditions of narrative expectations and its operating ironies. This along with the championing by great 70s Punk Ironist Rainer Werner Fassbinder, led to a greater degree of awareness of what we now call “the fake happy ending”, the shallow, fake promise of restoration and order in Old Hollywood movies that is about as convincing, on reflection, as the closing speech in Shakespeare’s MacBeth. 

Sirk’s inspiration was the great Euripides, arch-parodist of the Deus-Ex-Machina. His plays, as per Aristotle in his Poetics exemplified the worst, most obvious and least convincing endings in tragedy. Which is in fact the point of the “fake happy ending”, to be obvious, direct to a fault and unconvincing. The great mode is ironic, a tradition rich in Europe but not as much in America, at least in Sirk’s opinion. The fake happy endings of Sirk are actually fairly direct, especially the case in the bitter near-Chekhovian There’s Always Tomorrow, with its nasty, ringing, final lines sounding like it was uttered by the most bullying of all heavenly cherubs. In fact, the only way one could truly appreciate Sirk’s films emotionally, that is relate to the characters, is to engage with its ironies which are dramatic and painful.

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There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) – A toy-maker(Fred MacMurray) has the same freedom as his creations.

Even the most touching of happy endings, the most convincing shall we say, contain within itself a sense of futility. We see this in Vincente Minnelli’s wonderful Meet Me in St. Louis. Meet Me in St. Louis is a musical with a deftly paced vignette style narrative where the main “plot” of the family moving to New York doesn’t come in until a hour into the film. The main focus of the film is the coming of age of the daughters, with the eldest (Judy Garland) finding love with the boy next door and the youngest Tootie (the unforgettable Margaret O’Brien) in thrall to the heightened world of discovery that exemplifies childhood and most visible in the film’s Halloween sequence. Her imagination is so great that the powerful moment where she dramatically destroys the snowmen registers as especially heartbreaking, suggesting a child killing her childhood. At the end of the film, the father decides not to go to New York and stay in St. Louis and the girls attend the famous World’s Fair, but the film’s focus on growing up, on attacking childhood suggests only a momentary delay of the deeper problem. On the film’s DVD introduction, Liza Minnelli, daughter of director Vincente and actress Judy Garland notes that her parents met during the making of this film and at the end she suggests, with a tone of wistfulness, that the reason why the film is so successful is that “we would all like to have a family like that.”

A more notable unhappy happy ending is another film by Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz. The revelation that Oz was a dreamland and dreary, drab Kansas the reality which Dorothy accepts for all time and which she seemingly prefers to vibrant, magical Oz. Salman Rushdie in his BFI Monograph fulminated against this ending as a conservative Hollywood cop-out where happy, multi-cultural Oz was somehow considered inferior to drab, rural Kansas. In fact, one rumour about the film is that many audiences remember seeing a version of the film where the final shot of the film shows Dorothy in sepia-brown walking, back to audiences, with ruby red slippers. I am not entirely keen to dismiss this rumour because when I first saw The Wizard of Oz on TV as a small child, I remember distinctly seeing the film ending like this . The second viewing on TV, years later I might add, showed otherwise but my memory and powers of recollection are fairly good, nigh-eidetic, in fact.

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The Departed (2006) – “The rat symbolizes obviousness…” truer words were never spoken.

The wistful longing and false promise of Happy Endings is the subject of a grand spectacular music number in Martin Scorsese’s New York New York (1977), which Robert DeNiro’s character jokingly dismisses as “sappy endings”. He himself chases his own version, which he calls, “Major Chords”(the name of his cool night-club at the end of the film), mocked in turn by Liza Minnelli, who dedicates the title song song to her friend who’s “a great believer in major chords”, right before her performance. Famously, according to myth or legend, George Lucas told Scorsese that the film would be a success if it had a happy ending and then the film opened in the same week as Star Wars. Scorsese wouldn’t supply a sarcastic finish in the high-Sirk tradition until the last scene of The Departed, where a belated God in Track Pants, and the most perfectly placed rat in film history finishes a film whose main point is the absence of any driving moral force to barter justice. This finale thereby suggests a world so corrupt that the film itself cannot escape what it decries. A far cry from the genuinely tragic Casino and the mock-heroic Goodfellas which remain triumphs free of compromise.

So, the important question of happy endings is whether the film-maker is able to offer sufficient resistance or critique and place it into bold relief so as to(in the case of Sirk and Fassbinder) enable the audience to neither demand or ask for such hollow denouements in the first place.

Sirk has the final word: “In tragedy the life always ends. By being dead, the hero is at the same time rescued from life’s troubles. In melodrama, he lives on — in an unhappy happy end.”