THE WEB (1947, 87:10; Kino Lorber): The cast alone summons up almost anything we might wish from a film noir - Edmond O’Brien, Ella Raines, Vincent Price, William Bendix, with John Abbott and Fritz Leiber among the second ranks - but the screeenplay (by William Bowers, who would later write Jack Webb's -30-, and Bertram Millhauser, a frequent writer on Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series) has a boyish, resilient brightness about it that seems ultimately disqualifying of film noir. In an interesting twist, the protagonist (O’Brien) is a bold but highly principled lawyer who has his guileless qualities used against him by a cold-blooded millionaire industrialist (Price, clean-shaven) who hires him as a temporary bodyguard then frames him into committing murder - so he's shown to be fundamentally heroic and naïve before having to plead (and even question) his innocence.
O'Brien falls in love with the boss’s slinky secretary (Raines - who wouldn’t?) and their sly, flirtatious banter almost makes the film intermittently bouncy. Price's amiable yet quietly psychotic role (the man is doing everything he can to destroy his own company!) shows him playing off his prior performances in the stage success ANGEL STREET (filmed as GASLIGHT) and the previous year's SHOCK (1946), a trajectory that guided him toward the more extreme villainy that kept him working and top-billed for the rest of his years. Bendix is particularly interesting as a smarter, more polished character than he usually plays: a chess-playing police lieutenant and old friend of O’Brien’s family who does his best within delicate, almost Dostoevskian boundaries to establish the shooting as murder without incriminating the man who actually pulled the trigger.
Thanks to the capable work of Irving Glassberg (his first proper DP credit, though he had been the camera operator on 1931's seminal THE PUBLIC ENEMY), it looks like film noir, though not consistently; it's worldview is neither damned nor existential, but rather ultimately clever, wholesome, and enterprising - if flecked with moral tests and pitfalls. The film's only stumble is the necessary scene wherein O'Brien tracks down a former journalist, now an effete successful novelist (Howland Chamberlain), who offers up a vital clue; the character comes off as a fugitive from a Preston Sturges picture. Otherwise, Michael Gordon’s direction is persuasive, and Ms. Raines makes a point of turning her back to give us generous views of both sides of her various Yvonne Wood gowns, far beyond the reach of most secretaries’ budgets, sure to please either sex.
Worth seeing, this release - released separately on BD and DVD - is apparently the film’s first availability on any home video format. Region A, with optional English subtitles. Extras include a useful commentary by Prof. Jason A. Ney (who frames the picture, pun intended, as film noir) and a brace of trailers for other interesting Kino Lorber releases along similar lines you may have overlooked.
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