Tag Archives: black narcissus

“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).