Isn't Gish fantastic?

She's a wonderful example of an actor who played the role with utter conviction, using repression to give a performance that nonetheless is completely over the top. She was genuinely great, of course, in silent film (as Bette Davis said, when Lindsay Anderson complimented Gish on close-up while they were filming "The Whales of August," "She should be--she practically invented them, for Chrissakes!" or words to that effect. She was lovely and powerful in "Night of the Hunter" in a role that had nothing to do with everyday life, but was, like the rest of the film, a kind of magic realist/mythic fairy tale, and she used her knowledge of how to make her body an icon that had archetypal force--she should have had a competitive Oscar or at least nomination for that.

The writing and direction of "Cobweb" was so bad that perfectly good performers (Bacall, Widmark, even Boyer and Grahame) came across as drab or lost. Not Gish--this was crap, she probably knew, but, as a previous poster said, sank her teeth into it and shook it. With material, her performance might have been of the rank of Agnes Moorehead's immortal Aunt Fanny in "The Magnificent Ambersons," but Welles was a far better director and writer than this team, and Tarkington's novel a better source to begin with.