Sydney Pollack (1965)
A woman takes a probably lethal dose of barbiturates then phones a Seattle ‘crisis clinic’. Her call is answered by a student – a psychology major – who volunteers at the clinic and is on phone duty for the evening. He must keep the woman on the line to find out exactly where she is and so get help to her: his task is made more difficult by her refusal to reveal the location and insistence that she’s had enough of life. The Slender Thread‘s set-up suggests as its likely source a radio play or a tele-play from the days when TV drama was often transmitted live – some kind of two-hander anyway. In fact, Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay derives from a Life magazine article about a real case of this kind. (A notice on the clinic wall keeps reminding the audience that ‘Every two minutes someone attempts suicide in the United States’.) Silliphant and Sydney Pollack mean well but the result is pretty dire. It sounds strange, given the scenario, but The Slender Thread proves to lack a dramatic centre.
Pollack, directing his first cinema feature and eager to make instant impact, opens with a spectacular aerial tracking shot of Seattle. The camera works its way down to focus on the lonely, distracted figure of Inga Dyson (Anne Bancroft), who will take the overdose; then pulls back skyward until a renewed descent picks up Alan Newell (Sidney Poitier), leaving a college campus en route for the crisis clinic where he’ll try to save Inga. Dr Coburn (Telly Savalas), who runs the centre, leaves Alan to it for the evening; Marion (Indus Arthur), whose job doesn’t look to extend beyond making coffee, also goes off duty. The stage looks set for intense conversation between Inga and Alan but that’s not what you get. There are lengthy flashback diversions into Inga’s unhappy marriage to Mark Dyson (Steven Hill), a fishing-boat captain, who has just set sail again when his wife takes her cocktail of pills. The tension at Alan’s end of the phone line is, if anything, diluted by the urgent return of Coburn and Marion to the clinic. The emergency services face a formidable technical challenge in tracking down Inga’s exact whereabouts (a motel near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport). There’s some historical interest in a story whose suspense depends on a long-gone era of phone communications – yet the attention given to the tracking down has the effect of reducing the suspense.
Sidney Poitier is often required to work up his own dynamic. He does so resourcefully but he’s performing in a vacuum. Although Poitier in his autobiography recalled Anne Bancroft as ‘simply fantastic’ in this film, he doesn’t seem to be interacting with her – she’s entirely a disembodied voice. Bancroft has more opportunities in her scenes with Steven Hill, with Greg Jarvis as Inga’s son, and others. She’s striking in some of her character’s more outré moments – when she gets overexcited at ‘one of those discotheques’ (the script’s words) or makes doomed efforts to save the life of the ailing bird that she comes upon while walking on a beach. But Inga’s supposedly seductive attempts to rekindle her husband’s passion in the bedroom is a by-numbers sequence. All in all, Bancroft isn’t nearly as convincingly depressed as she would be as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate two years later. Poitier has a fine bit when Inga orders him to laugh; Alan does so with such sustained conviction that she angrily tells him to stop. Alan’s euphoria, though, when Inga is finally found and the news reaches the crisis clinic that ‘she’s still breathing’, seems a bit premature – even though it’s a relief for the audience too that The Slender Thread is at an end. Loyal Griggs’ black-and-white cinematography is stylish without much purpose. Quincy Jones’ score gives the impression we may be in for a jazzy urban thriller – or maybe the impression that Jones is unsure of the brief. He, Poitier and Silliphant would collaborate much more fruitfully on In the Heat of the Night (1967).
4 January 2025
