The Glass Web (1953 | USA | 81 minutes | Jack Arnold)

This rainy city has always felt like a perfect Ground Zero for film noir, and Seattle’s been packing Noir Czar Eddie Muller’s touring Noir City film festival for years. 

So it’s no surprise a noir did surface during the Festival. Kudos to SIFF, however, for getting their mitts on a genuine film noir curiosity (in 3D, no less) that also happens to kinda rule. 

The Glass Web originally hit theaters in 1953, ostensibly just an assembly-line programmer at the time. Director Jack Arnold was viewed by Hollywood as a workmanlike journeyman—a gun-for-hire who could bring a competent film in, on time and on budget, without leaving much of a personal stamp on his work in the process. 

But if Arnold was a journeyman, he also happened to be an extremely adroit craftsman as well: Four years after The Glass Web’s release, he was helming one of the most profound, thoughtful, and thrilling sci-fi epics of the ‘50s, The Incredible Shrinking Man. And his two-fisted genre creds proved to be so on-point that he came within a whisker of directing one of the noir genre’s unimpeachable masterpieces, 1958’s Touch of Evil (a gig that eventually fell to no less a figure than Orson Welles).

The Glass Web follows the saga of Don Newell (John Forsythe), a writer working on a popular true-crime TV series. On the face of it, the guy’s got a picture-perfect life, respected as a writer and married to a doting and beautiful wife. But like any noir heel worth his lousy lot, Don’s nursing a dirty secret, and her name’s Paula Ranier (Kathleen Hughes). 

An actress who often works on the series, Paula engaged in a clandestine affair with Don not long ago, and she’s looking to literally cash in on her ex-lover’s desire to keep their tryst on the hush-hush. Then Paula turns up murdered, and Don looks an awful lot like the culprit. 

The Glass Web doesn’t quite hit the lofty heights of the aforementioned Welles noir classic: It’s largely shot in a bright, utilitarian fashion by Maury Gertsman to maximize the efficacy of its 3D presentation, and you’ll likely guess the killer’s identity long before the denouement that surfaces in the final reel. 

But that doesn’t prevent this from being a smart, wildly entertaining little gem in its own right. Arnold manages to pull out his share of modest but still effective pockets of atmosphere, and the script by Robert Blees and Leonard Lee casts an amusingly self-aware, almost satiric eye on the assembly-line grind of episodic television. 

The actors hit their marks ably as well. Forsythe gives great unnerved noir heel, and Hughes proves to be a memorable, delectably malevolent femme fatale. Richard Denning, a handsome blonde character actor who never quite graduated to leading man status, gives a great, very funny performance as the series’ cheerfully opportunistic producer. And as the show’s chief researcher, legendary tough guy Edward G. Robinson lends effortless gravitas to a character that’s a canny inversion of his role in Billy Wilder’s classic 1944 noir, Double Indemnity. 

The Glass Web also makes fantastic use of 3D, implementing the format primarily to capture the depth-of-field in layered and busy settings like movie studios and steam-informed alleyways. There’s a real sense of immersion that seldom feels showy on display here: The stereoscopic 3D on Universal’s 4K digital restoration straight-up takes your breath away in places, without feeling like it’s trying too hard. That said, Arnold and company do dutifully include one scene that revels in the format’s jab-shit-in-your-face shamelessness—but it’s way more fun than it is cynical or crass. 

Bolstered by the box office success of his first 3D feature, It Came from Outer Space (also released in 1953) and this, Arnold kept busy throughout the fifties, dipping into the 3D well twice more with turns helming the stone-classic Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954 and its insubstantial but fun sequel, Revenge of the Creature, in 1955. He also lent his guiding hand to some of the decade’s best (The Incredible Shrinking Man, This Island Earth) and silliest (Monster on the Campus) 2D sci-fi flicks, and directed one of the era’s most wonderfully overheated teen exploitation movies, 1958’s High School Confidential. Orson Welles may have gotten the most posthumous laurels, but Jack Arnold was no damn slouch himself—and The Glass Web provides thoroughly enjoyable proof positive of that.

The Glass Web screened at the SIFF Cinema Downtown as part of the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival on May 18. The movie has also been reissued recently on blu-ray by Kino Lorber Video.