Fri 15 Oct 2010
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: MAX EHRLICH – Spin the Glass Web / Book & Film: The Glass Web (1953).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[8] Comments
MAX EHRLICH – Spin the Glass Web. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1952. Bantam #1096, paperback, 1953.
Filmed as The Glass Web. Universal International, 1953. Edward G. Robinson, John Forsythe, Kathleen Hughes, Marcia Henderson, Richard Denning, Hugh Sanders. Screenplay: Robert Blees & Leonard Lee. Director: Jack Arnold.
Max Ehrlich started writing for newspapers, moved on to Radio in the late ’30s and Television in the ’50s. In between times he wrote a few books, including Spin the Glass Web (Harper, 1952) which draws on his experience in live TV to craft a neat tale of a not-quite-innocent screen-writer caught up in murder.
The story opens on Don Newell, head writer of a TV show of rather questionable taste but undoubted allure — they dramatize recent crimes as sensationally as possible. Don is married and blessed with children, and the story starts as he decides to buy off his mercenary mistress Paula — or kill her, depending on the moment.
As he makes his way to her apartment, we flashback to their meeting, his seduction and attendant complications, including blackmail. The third-person narrative unfolds a bit further and we find Paula has a criminal husband knocking around somewhere, and another TV writer on the string: Henry Hinge, a pudgy, detail-obsessed, technical advisor with ambitions of getting Newell’s job.
Flashbacks and unfolding done with, Don turns up at Paula’s apartment, finds her already murdered, and slowly realizes his problems are only beginning.
Spin never generates much mystery; it’s pretty clear early on who the killer is and how he’s going to trip himself up, but the momentum of the tale comes from Newell’s frantic efforts to get out from under Hinge’s compulsive poking around into the details of the case, and the effort of trying to act natural around his increasingly suspicious wife.
Ehrlich spins this out rather effectively, using as a backdrop the producer’s decision to dramatize Paula’s murder for the show Don has to write: the closer the show comes to air time, the tighter the web Hinge spins around the hapless, haunted Newell.
SPOILER ALERT: I have to mention here that although, as I said, the killer and his undoing are telegraphed early on, Ehrlich finishes the book by cranking up the old deus ex machina and taking it out for a spin.
The result is dramatically satisfying but hardly convincing as the getting-away-with-it killer is gunned down by a passing policeman who sees him running in the night.
Now when I was a kid, you could get shot and killed for running away from a cop and not stopping when he ordered you to. I mean, I never tried it myself, but I saw it on the News a few times, and it was featured in a couple of movies, most notably The Prowler and Woman in the Window.
By the time I was wearing a badge and gun, the rules had tightened up a bit, but I still had the chance once to legally shoot a fleeing felon in the back; couldn’t do it, though.
When it came right down to it and I was squeezing the trigger, I suddenly said to myself, “No, you better hadn’t,”and stopped. (I ended up catching the burglar when he ran into a chicken-wire fence.) Anyway, whenever I see this bit in a book or movie, I always recall that moment and wonder how often it happened in what we call Real Life.
Getting back to Ehrlich’s book, it was filmed the next year as The Glass Web “in Amazing 3-D” at Universal by the redoubtable Jack Arnold, who also brought the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the screen and detailed the domestic life of the Incredible Shrinking Man.
It’s a solid job of film-making, with John Forsythe suitably harried as the philandering writer, Edward G. Robinson (recalling his role in Double Indemnity) playing the obsessed Hinge, and a very effective Kathleen Hughes as the predatory Paula, whom the writers contrive to kill at the start of the movie and kill again later on.
There’s a wonderful scene early in the film, well-played and tightly-written, between Robinson and Hughes that sketches their pathetic relationship perfectly. And if the wrap-up goes a bit over the top, it at least makes for fun watching.
Editorial Comment: You can’t make it out it, I’m sure, but on the front cover of the Harper hardcover edition up above, it reads: “Your Money Back If You Can Resist Breaking The Seal.”
Which makes this a Harper Sealed Mystery that was missed in Victor Berch’s checklist of the same. The previous series ended in 1934, some 18 years earlier. Are there any others that came along later? We’ll find out.
October 16th, 2010 at 5:39 am
I haven’t read or watched this for a while, but have pleasant memories of the book and the movie. Robinson was good in it, and I recall liking Forsythe, who somehow could suggest a fairly good man who has slipped up somehow without losing his inate likability (always thought he was wasted on television — he did some good films including Hitchcock’s THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, KITTEN WITH A WHIP, and ESCAPE FROM FORT BRAVO).
What struck me to some extent about the television background was that it reminded me a bit of a comic take on the same basic setup (to some extent) in THE GAZEBO. Naturally most films tend to take a satiric look at television since it was still the great enemy at this time. You could do a pretty good film festival of Hollywood films about the television industry and this would be one of the few that took the subject half seriously.
Max Erlich wrote a few more suspense novels, at least one science fiction novel (THE BIG EYE), and a horror novel all of them fairly good books.
Dan
Though I was a private investigator and not a policeman, like you the one time I had a legitimate reason to use the gun I was legally carrying and authorized to use I didn’t, I’m afraid a lot of police weren’t as reluctant — especially in those pre Miranda rights days.
As in any profession a few bad apples and a few corrupt police forces tarred all the honest good police. I can still recall calling the local police in one small town to ask them to pick up a suspect in an industrial espionage case and when I got there they had surrounded his house and brought out their machine guns and tear gas bombs. The poor guy was hiding under his bed with a bottle of bourbon — he didn’t even own a gun.
I will admit though it was pretty easy to get him to cooperate after that.
October 16th, 2010 at 6:30 am
Wow! A Cop and a Private Dick…better watch my step.
Here in the UK, private investigators have no more rights than any normal citizen. This means no guns. The uniformed policeman doesn’t carry a gun, either. There are armed response units, and if the circumstances warrant it then both uniform and plain clothes can get a weapon from the armourer.
Things are different in Europe. I was in Rome during the run up to the elections a few years ago, and there were loads of cops with machine guns slung over their shoulders. These are not guys who you feel like stopping and asking directions from!
October 16th, 2010 at 7:16 am
Speaking of British private investigators, check out the downbeat series PUBLIC EYE starring Alfred Burke. Many of the 1970’s episodes are “wiped” but many still survive. The show starts off with Burke being released from prison for accepting stolen goods. One of he first things he does is visit a prostitute but she tries to rob him and things go downhill from there. Gives a good portrait of the seedy life of the average guy trying to make a pound but both the criminals and police dislike him. You need a multi region dvd player I think.
October 16th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Burke was superb in the role. Frank Marker, the main character, was an honest, kind, fair, scrupulous, skilled professional…who suffered from rotten luck and always ended up worst in a fight. The series is startling to watch nowadays in that so much of it is downbeat,grimy and realistic. Only at the end of the final series do we get the sense that Marker’s fortunes might finally be on the up. There’s nothing like it on TV nowadays.
October 16th, 2010 at 9:47 am
I agree with David about THE BIG EYE (1949), a pretty good end of the world novel and alternative riff on Balmer and Wylie’s WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1934) set in the futuristic year of 1960.
I seem to remember Ehrlich going on an eco-disaster bender in the ’70s, with him scripting a TV thriller or two with that theme.
THE GLASS WEB is compulsively watchable; you’re hooked early on.
October 17th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
[…] Stumpf’s recent review of Spin the Glass Web serendipitously revealed the fact that it was published by Harper in […]
February 9th, 2012 at 2:45 pm
The Glass Web is a great Hollywood film noir…..I have not seen it in many years but what I remember most is the record “Temptation” playing on the victim’s phonograph, throughout the apartment of the murdered blackmailer Paula. On and on and on, echoing down the hallway corridor in ghostly strains.
Whenever I hear Temptation sung by Perry Como, I think of the murder scene in the Glass Web.
January 15th, 2018 at 9:14 pm
It’s funny, because as I’m reading this there’s a scene where they describe the researcher / script doctor’s reactions when presented with a script where something was off (p. 39 in the paperback):
“But then, when something was out of kilter in the big, flabby head, the whole intricate mechanism that was Henry’s started to jangle, bells began to ring, the wheels started to wobble and vibrate. It might be a little thing, a minute thing, a grain of sand perhaps, something that any ordinary mechanism might pass off.”
“But not Henry’s.”
“All of his mental gauges were painfully sensitive; they instantly recorded shock. And from that point on, Henry Hinge would be unhappy; he would be miserable.”
The moment I read that I was reminded of Edward G. Robinson’s speech at the start of Double Indemnity and though that it would have been funny for Robinson to have had this as a role. Imagine my delight to see that he did; I have to track down a copy of this film. I wonder how conscious Ehrlich was of the whole thing, or whoever wound up casting Robinson.