Is Jack Arnold’s The Glass Web (1953) one of the best 3D films of the 1950s? It might be, and that’s ironic, since most theatres chose to show the flat 2D version, and the trailer doesn’t bother to trumpet 3D. Even so, the 3D Film Archive restoration on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber looks so sharp that we can probably say the film has never looked this good.
After the literally shattering opening credits over a glass design, The Glass Web begins with a car pulling up to a rocky scene. There’s a scanty bush placed in the foreground to emphasize depth, and the whole film will have those kinds of well-placed details.
In the two-minute take, the camera dollies back with the walking couple until it passes between the wooden frame of a mineshaft. The woman looks unimpressed at the hole in the ground and announces she’s going back to the car. As she turns to walk away, the man shoots her thrice, and she collapses with no visible wound or blood on her white top. He unceremoniously picks up her body and drops it down the shaft.
Then comes the most startling detail. The camera pulls back to reveal booms and cameras, and over to the far left is an announcer telling us to tune in next week to Crime of the Week. Then he starts praising the sponsor’s cigarettes.
Now we’re watching this world from a control room with multiple video screens. Sitting in the booth are three men whom we’ll learn are director-producer Dave Markson (Richard Denning), writer Don Newell (John Forsythe), and crabby, detail-oriented researcher Henry Hayes (Edward G. Robinson). Watching the proceedings from a glass room to the side are Newell’s wife Louise (Marcia Henderson) and their two small children, all calmly watching the enacted murder. When the boy starts praising Daddy’s script for having two murders, Mom tells him not to talk during the commercial, as it’s the most important part.
The blonde who has just been shot and dropped down the shaft is an aspiring actress named Paula Rainer (Kathleen Hughes), and we’ll soon learn she’s stringing along both Markson and Hayes for career reasons and for money. She reveals her contempt for them in no uncertain terms. In other words, she’s the kind of character who’s on the verge of being murdered.
That murder happens in a carefully detailed, suspenseful scene that tells us everything except who killed her. We know that she angrily confronted Hayes in her apartment and showed him the door. We also know that Newell, the morally compromised sap and perfect patsy, didn’t do it.
One of the pleasanter aspects of Robert Blees and Leonard Lee’s script for The Glass Web is that it avoids the predictable situation of Newell being suspected or arrested. Things happen quite differently, and it’s all wrapped up with a densely imagined climax in 81 minutes. We’ll say only that the opening phony murder is echoed twice more, once with visible blood for contrast, and that the studio’s technical apparatus is well-used. Noir fans will be reminded of Robinson’s role in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), which Arnold seems to evoke deliberately.
Robinson had several recurring personas in films. He could be the shrewd detective just as easily as the spurned lover who commits murder. The Glass Web uses the audience’s familiarity with both modes to leave us uncertain which one he’s playing here.
Television‘s Influence On and Off the Film Set
Television was the enemy for early 1950s Hollywood. Made the same year was Arch Oboler’s The Twonky, about an evil television that tries to hypnotize and dominate people, if that’s blunt enough for you. So it seems unusual for this Hollywood film to lavish so much attention on the details of live television production, never mind to use them so intelligently.
That’s one of the themes making The Glass Web interesting, and it amounts to a critique. As if the opening scene weren’t “meta” enough, Hayes becomes so excited by the sensational murder of one of their own alumna that he pushes the producer to turn the event into the season’s final episode to score high ratings and convince the sponsor to renew the show. It would boost his career, and this ripped-from-the-headlines episode would give the show what the producer calls “a real sock”.
It would be nice to believe that such a crass and tasteless idea has become dated with the passing decades. Yes, wouldn’t it?
Another fascinating element, and a more unwitting one, is that we can understand how the grinding personal and sexual politics in the television studio are probably much the same as in movie studios. Notice that the femme fatale is the one who sexually manipulates men, when the inverse was much more common.
In a surprising moment, the victim’s landlady (Kathleen Freeman) confronts the police and Hayes with her assertion that Rainer was a good person, despite knowing various men, and she calls out “how men think”. Rainer is also contrasted with a drunken next-door party girl played by Eve McVeagh, who happened to play Rainer in a live television production of the same story; how’s that for meta?
Arnold, who, according to the commentary, had a reputation for inappropriate behavior on set, demonstrates the same eye for 3D composition as in the films he made on either side of it, It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). One of his visual devices is not merely to stage scenes in depth but to have photographer Maury Gertsman continually dolly backward or forward, revealing or concealing foreground details and creating a coherent space.
The commentary by film professor Jason A. Ney is especially informative and entertaining. Along with 3D experts Mike Ballew and Greg Kintz, he uses The Glass Web as the occasion to provide fascinating details on the history of 3D and the technical processes involved. He also compares the film’s narrative with the original novel by radio and television writer Max Ehrlich, Spin the Glass Web (1952). Ehrlich may be best known for the novel and film of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975).
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of The Glass Web offers options for 3D televisions or anaglyphic red/blue 3D with glasses, which are provided. If you have a regular TV and choose the first option, you’ll see the film in regular 2-D. The anaglyphic plays just fine.