The Web

I mentioned quite some time ago that when I visited my relatives in Germany back in the late 1980s, one of the movies that one of the channels put in their late-night slot that I didn't stay up to watch was The Web. I never got a chance to see it after that, and since it was released by Universal, it's not the sort of movie that shows up on TCM. The Web finally got a DVD release last year, and I shelled out the $10 or so to pick up a copy, Eventually, I got around to watching it.

Edmond O'Brien stars as Bob Regan, a lawyer who, at the start of the movie is representing the Italian-American owner of a fruit stand in small claims court. The guy won his case, which involved a rich businessman who ran into the fruit stand and caused some damages, but that rich guy never paid up. So Bob decides to press the issue by barging in to the businessman, Andrew Colby's (Vincent Price) board meeting!

Colby is actually more impressed with Regan's chutzpah than anything else, and decides to reward Regan for it by giving him a job. Apparently Colby had an old business associate embezzle money from him and blame Colby for framing him. That man just got out of prison a few months back, and Colby is worried that the guy might come to his house to try to kill him. Perhaps Regan could serve as part lawyer-on-retainer, and part live-in bodyguard? The "respectable" uptown lawyers who handle all the business for Colby's company would find this beneath them, but an independent lawyer trying to build up a practice could use a rich client like Colby, especially when Colby is willing to pay Regan far more than the job is worth.

Now, any normal person ought to see the warning signs a mile away, and that there's a catch. But this is a Hollywood movie, and if we had normal people, we wouldn't have so much of a movie. (Alternatively, you could make the lawyer jokes about Regan, being lawyer, having no ethical compunctions that would prevent him from taking this job.) And as it turns out, there are two catches. One is that the guy who claims Colby framed him shows up, and gets shot by Regan in a way that makes it look like Regan was shooting in self-defense, only for the guy's daughter to show up some time later to contradict a lot of Colby's claims about her father.

The other catch is that Colby has a personal secretary, Noel Faraday (Ella Raines). She's young and pretty, so you just know that Regan is going to fall hard for her, even though she's technically already spoken for by Colby. This is going to make Colby jealous; in fact, jealous enough that he might just do something that will leave Regan thinking Colby's framed him, just like that other guy claimed about Colby. Fortunately, however, Regan isn't all that dumb, and his got somebody nominally on his side in the form of police detective Damico (William Bendix) who, being a Production Code-era cop, is going to be on the side of good and exonerate the people who didn't do anything wrong.

So, The Web winds it way to its ultimate denouement, which you can see coming, although the road it takes to get there is entertaining enough. If The Web had been made a decade earlier, it would have been done so as a programmer. In the late 1940s, however, with the infancy of television, programmer-type movies were starting to seem a little old and rough around the edges. Not that they're bad movies, just that they don't seem to have quite as much shine as the programmers of the 1930s did.

The Web is no exception. The four main stars fill roles which feel as though they'd been filled in a dozen similar movies, but do so quite competently and entertainingly. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but also nothing really wrong, just 90 minutes of good, solid entertainment. It's the sort of movie that would be perfect for Eddie Muller to get for an edition of Noir Alley, if he hasn't already done so.