HotToastyRag Sidney Poitier is a college student who volunteers once a week at a suicide hotline clinic. When he checks in one evening, he gets his coffee, sharpens his pencil, looks at his files, and answers the phone. "I need to talk to someone," a husky-voiced woman requests. The woman, Anne Bancroft, has taken pills. Sidney tries to keep her talking long enough so that he can trace her call and find out where she is.The Slender Thread is a fantastic thriller that takes a very simple story and manages to completely engross the audience by the potential outcome. Stirling Silliphant's screenplay is very interesting, and Sydney Pollack, in his first theatrical film, creates a fantastically tense atmosphere. Since the film cuts back and forth between Sidney Poitier in the clinic and Anne Bancroft's flashbacks, it would be easy for the story to drag or seem uneven. Pollack's direction keeps the main goal in sight and constantly moves towards it in every scene. I guarantee you'll be so enthralled by the film, the ending will come too soon.Sidney gives an excellent performance, trying desperately to save Anne's life even though he's a once-a-week volunteer. He's nervous, ill-prepared, and doesn't always play by the rules. Rather than acting as a bottomless well of human kindness, he gets frustrated as the time ticks on. He—and the audience—becomes emotionally involved with Anne, and before the end, everyone in and watching the film will be hanging by a slender thread, waiting and anxious to find out what will happen!

calvinnme ...even if it couldn't be made today, at least the way it was made then.It was a terrific suspense movie that had the added benefit of showing Poitier in a totally race-neutral role as young psychology student Alan Newell who is volunteering at the local suicide hotline crisis center on a night that he has every reason to believe will be quiet...and then Inga Dyson (Ann Bancroft) calls him. She has just taken a bottle of barbiturates, does not want to be rescued, but does want to talk. So Alan has to keep his cool and keep Inga on the line long enough to be found, and she only has about 90 minutes to live.What makes this movie totally anachronistic today is that the entire plot centers around a coordinated effort by scores of public servants in Seattle to trace Inga's phone number and save her before the pills do their job. Of course it would take about 10 seconds for the line to be traced today, which would kind of do away with the suspense.The suspense is that her call COULD be traced, but it requires the huge telephone company building with countless thousands of connecting plugs and wires that had to be narrowed down, plus the police and fire departments and the State Department of Motor Vehicles, in order to locate the caller's number and where she was calling from. It was like a giant public works department that gave employment to pretty much every proactive player we see in the movie.In the character development department we have a conversation between Alan an Inga in which we see how she got to the point of despair. It is one part of unforgiveness on her husband's part for a deed done before they were ever married, too much time on Inga's hands one day as the husband continues to stay emotionally detached from her as though she is some unclean thing, the fact that she wanted to talk to somebody about how she felt but could find nobody who would, and the final straw involves the death of an injured bird that is regarded callously by those around her while she tries to help.In addition to Poitier and Bancroft, Steven Hill gives a chilling and highly credible performance as the unforgiving husband who's driven Bancroft to her suicide attempt. He's such a creepy character that he makes us almost want to force him to swallow those pills instead, and that's a sign that he plays the part to perfection. Highly recommended because the emotions still ring true even if the technology is long gone.

Dead_Head_Filmmaker There are so many things right with this film. Sidney Pollack's debut is my favourite of his films. The shot selection and direction of actors is held to the highest standard I have seen from him. Sidney Poitier is bang on as the Help Line Volunteer, but Anne Bancroft is what really makes this great, entertaining film a masterpiece.Anne Bancroft had a great career. Even in the mediocre and poor films she was in, she always shined. This is among her top three roles (along with The Graduate and Great Expectations) in no particular order.This film is very entertaining and contains quite a bit of subtext in each shot. It touches on themes of racism, suicide, sexism, mental instability, death, isolation and abandonment, infidelity and heroism. You get the feeling that Newell (Newly Well) empathizes with Dyson (Die-soon) more than he lets on, and it is kept brilliantly under the surface. GREAT JOB POLLACK!

moonspinner55 A college student who volunteers one night a week at a crisis help center receives a call from a woman who has just taken an overdose of barbiturates...can he keep her on the line long enough for the police to find and rescue her? Slim plot puffed up with importance by director Sydney Pollack, making his feature film debut; Pollack opens the picture with a dizzying array of overhead shots of Seattle, presumably to help us get our bearings for where we are and who the main players are, but with Quincy Jones madly changing music cues in the background, it becomes an unintentionally silly set-piece. Sidney Poitier plays the student with a nimble mix of concern, panic and irritation, and only occasionally is he encouraged to overdo it (Pollack certainly doesn't help, giving us too many extreme close-ups of Poitier wild-eyed and sweating). Anne Bancroft is the troubled wife and mother whose world is crashing down around her (actually, it's just her marriage) and I'm not sure what we're meant to get out of the glimpses of her working life (Bancroft asks a co-worker to go to lunch, and when the girl says she's busy Bancroft appears terribly wounded--doesn't she have any other acquaintances who care about her? and what about her relationship with her boss, which sounds one-sided-flirtatious?). Bancroft, with a big crop of wavy hair, is weighed down by this woeful role and she's forced into looking shell-shocked most of the time, though there is one scene--the hospital waiting room--where she gets to break character a bit and gets a wicked gleam in her eye. The movie is well-paced and is full of visual accoutrements, but one wonders about that ending and what exactly was solved. **1/2 from ****