Web
Directed by Michael GordonBob Regan, a lawyer down on his luck, is hired by wealthy industrialist Andrew Colby to serve as his personal bodyguard following an apparent threat on Colby's life. Regan is skeptical but needs the work, and Colby's world – all polished surfaces and private elevators – seems to promise a straightforward assignment. Into this arrangement steps Noel Faraday, Colby's secretary, whose composure masks an unease that Regan cannot yet name.
When Regan kills an intruder in what appears to be clear self-defense, the official machinery moves against him with suspicious efficiency. Lieutenant Damico, a cop whose bluntness reads as either diligence or hostility, pursues Regan as a suspect in what is now reclassified as murder. Colby's support, initially reassuring, begins to feel conditional. Noel, caught between loyalty to her employer and a growing trust in Regan, is pulled toward disclosures that could destroy her own position.
Web belongs to the strand of postwar noir that locates its menace not in the underworld but in the executive suite – where respectability is itself the weapon. The film uses a deceptively modest thriller frame to examine how institutional power criminalizes the vulnerable and protects the guilty, a concern that places it squarely within Universal International's mid-decade run of socially alert genre pictures.
