A Tattered Web (1971)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Average TV movie concerning cranky cop (Bridges) whose son-in-law (Converse) is having an affair with local harlot (Helm) that threatens to de-rail his marriage to Bridges beloved daughter (Shockley). Bridges tries to convince both Converse and Helm (separately) to end the infidelity, but goes too far, resulting in the title woes.Murray Hamilton is reliable as Bridges' loyal police buddy, concerned by his colleague's apparent carelessness in handling aspects of the murder case, while familiar faces Walter Brooke, James Hong, John Fiedler and Whit Bissell have small roles. Broderick Crawford has a key supporting role as a drunk fingered for the crime, but Hamilton's not convinced by the forced confession obtained by Bridges. In my opinion Shockley, as the almost child-like daughter of Bridges over-protectiveness, does an outstanding job, neglected by her two-timing husband, but knowing more than she appears to comprehend.Small-scale thriller moves at an economical pace with solid performances and some moments of suspense. Experienced TV and movie director Wendkos knows how to fashion a taut thriller for 70 minutes, but where there was the promise of a tense climax on two occasions (in both the bedroom scene and cliff-edge confrontation with Converse), neither comes to fruition, instead, the conclusion is tepid and ultimately disappointing.

This film is a low budget drama which is chiefly remarkable for containing one of Broderick Crawford's finest performances, as a befuddled drunk who has murdered his best friend but doesn't remember doing so, and an intense and convincing performance by Lloyd Bridges (father of Jeff and Beau). Bridges plays Police Sergeant Ed Stagg who is obsessively devoted to protecting his grown daughter, whom he raised alone after her mother ran off. He discovers that his daughter's husband is having an affair, and he orders him to stop it. Things get out of hand and someone ends up dead by accident, but dead is dead, and a cover-up is necessary. So we get involved in a whodunnit where the who is concealed, and will this all unravel? Bridges is rather terrifying in his obsessive love for the dreamy and over-protected daughter, and the extremes to which he will go. He reveals terrible things about his own childhood as the story progresses. It is an engrossing film.

I watched this movie with a girlfriend who HATES stories which give away the murderer in the first hour. However, by the time the credits rolled, we both agreed that it was well-acted (apart from the police sergeant's daughter) drama with a great deal of suspense, as neither of us guessed what Lloyd Bridges' character would do as his life began to unravel in the final minutes.I thought Lloyd Bridges put in an excellent performance despite the limitations of the script. The story overall was good and there was nothing that wasn't believable, unlike 'Murder Once Removed', for example (though I enjoyed that movie as well).The test of an good movie has to be that you don't leave your seat until the end, and neither of us did.

A critically important component of virtually all successful cinema is suspense, a perception of uncertainty within the viewer as to what may ensue from the events occurring upon the screen, whichever genre, present even when we know an outcome (Apollo 13) if the work is done well; all of which is meant to point to a total absence of suspense in this weakly directed feature, which dully plods from scene to scene until its flat ending. Lloyd Bridges, cast as police sergeant Ed Stagg, has discovered that the husband (Frank Converse) of his daughter Tina (Sallie Shockley) is dallying with a local chippy and during Stagg's attempts to end the adultery, he accidentally commits a murder, upon which he forges a plan to place responsibility for the crime upon a local inebriate, tangentially providing a question of the title: was Scott's "What a tangled web we weave..." (Marmion) the intended source, inaptly transposed into "tattered"? (an amendment that would be of a piece within this poorly crafted affair). The film is steeped in cliché, hampered by a witless score, and the acting from the three mentioned leads is often embarrassingly bad, notably in the case of Bridges, which might be attributed to the hackneyed script if it were not that Anne Helm as the doxy and Murray Hamilton as Stagg's partner manage to make something of their material, while Broderick Crawford rises above his during his few scenes.