In response to my review of The Man in the Web, a reader critiques:
I had a hard time following that review. So Carolyn Jones plays a corpse for much of the movie? And no mention of her basic sexiness to help enliven the show, must mean she was quite dead — or acted it. What an odd sounding movie.
And, well, she wasn’t sexy. At all. No one was really sexy. Mz. Jones basically played an alcoholic shrew of dubious charm throughout the first half of the movie, after which she disappears, not permitted to actually play her character’s corpse (this opportunity was given to an anonymous sheet). I would not be surprised if the screenwriter claimed to be taking a subtle dig at the role of women in small town America by making her an alcoholic, money-obsessed woman trading sex for money behind her husband’s back. bored out of her skull – and subject to nervous breakdowns (although the episode did happen in NYC).
After the obligatory happy climax, Ladd’s character marries another woman, who never rises out of her gender-assigned role, has no color, no real personality except to weep when her own marriage ends in travesty.
I did want to mention this was not a traditional murder mystery, as there was no real way to deduce the killer given the array of clues. You could try to cheat by considering the tropes of Hollywood, but that always deadens the impact of the story, as tropes often do. Which reminds me, someday (maybe on a lovely blizzardy day in January) I must expound on my (no doubt naive and totally improper) theory of story-telling and its role in any human society.
