Minnelli's classic is a kind of Grand Hotel for neurotics. In a private psychiatric clinic, a seemingly perfunctory decision-the selection of new curtains, plain cotton or flowery chintz, for the library-becomes the catalyst for a universal psychosis. It becomes difficult to tell the staff (director Charles Boyer, Dr. Richard Widmark, activities director Lauren Bacall, and bookkeeper Lillian Gish) from the patients-John Kerr, outstanding among them, as a sensitive, suicidal artist. (The Cobweb is discussed in Psychiatry in Cinema, co-authored by Dr. Glen Gabbard, who lectures at PFA on November 4 and 5.) Apart from Minnelli's direction, helping to rescue this "Drapes of Wrath" from potboiler hell was Leonard Rosenman's twelve-tone score, completely without precedent in a Hollywood cinema which still shunned Schoenberg in favor of the romantics of an earlier era. Motivic elements introduced in the startlingly shrill title sequence undergo dramatic permutations throughout the textured, chamber music-like score, elucidating the text with polyphonic devices. Yet the score itself is neither dramatic nor naturalistic: "It was my intention," Rosenman states in Roy Prendergast's book A Neglected Art, which treats the score at length, "not to 'ape' or mimic the physical aspect of the screen mise en sc?ne but...to show what was going on inside characters' heads...The movie was very refined and very slick...But I wanted more neurosis."