My newest essay for Ed Brubaker's Kill Or Be Killed takes on Vincente Minnelli beautiful, wonderfully obsessive, The Cobweb, starring  Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant, Adele Jergens, Fay Wray, John Kerr and Susan Strasberg… 

“On The Cobweb, I’d arrive on the set and there he’d [Vincente Minnelli] be up on the boom, zooming up to the drapes, and I thought to myself, ‘He’s really in heaven now.’ The bloody drapes. It was all about the goddamned drapes in The Cobweb.” – Lauren Bacall

The drapes. The drapes in the library of the high-end private psychiatric clinic. Those dreary old Lilian Gish Miss Inch chosen drapes just hanging there for decades – taunting, not only the patients, but the doctors even more – enough to cause tense confrontations, enraged phone calls and … if you put your subtitles on while watching the movie, “fabric ripping.” Anyone who’s seen Vincent Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) knows what I’m talking about because those drapes and the trouble they cause …

Read the entire essay in the newest Kill Or Be Killed. Order here.