The Slender Thread Blu-ray Review
The fraying of a human psyche.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 15, 2012
If, as the old saying (which originated with none other than Benjamin Franklin) goes, the only two things of which we can
be certain are death and taxes, a perhaps puckish auxiliary question might be asked: would
you ever think of
paying your taxes ahead of time? Probably not, which leads to a second quandary: what could ever lead someone to
take their own life, when it's obvious our built in mortality is going to take care of that "problem" sooner or later, anyway?
Suicide remains one of the more baffling traits of humans, and perhaps no "outsider" can ever fully understand the
reasons that would lead someone else to kill themselves. My own family was rocked with the suicide of an Aunt of mine
(long before I was born), and though her siblings—including my father—haltingly tried to tie her decision to a childhood
spent in foster care, it never really completely addressed the depression that must have colored her emotional being,
especially since my father and his other siblings were also shunted around from foster home to foster home as they grew
up and managed (for the most part, anyway) to "escape" unscathed, forging extremely successful personal and
professional lives. But suicide is a rather rampant if frequently ignored epidemic, as the placard emblazoned across the
wall of a call-in help line in Sydney Pollack's directorial debut
The Slender Thread makes clear: "Every two minutes
someone attempts suicide in the United States". It's a staggering statistic and one that brings a certain sense of urgency
to this well meaning if soap operatic look at a woman in distress who reaches out to someone—anyone—after a perhaps
irreversible decision she's made to end her own life.
Stirling Silliphant had one of the more fascinatingly diverse writing careers in television and film history. Silliphant
started his career on the advertising side of things, perhaps figuring out early what would sell, and his early television
career saw him churning out episodic television for any number of huge hits of the day, including
The Mickey Mouse
Club,
Alfred Hitchock Presents and
Perry Mason. He made his feature film writing debut with the
well regarded
Village of the Damned in 1960, still one of the most iconic science fiction films of its era. Silliphant
continued to work for television throughout the sixties, but also contributed screenplays for a hugely disparate array of
films.
The Slender Thread came along in 1965, followed by what is arguably Silliphant's most lasting
achievement and the film for which he won the Academy Award,
In the Heat of the Night. Silliphant's post-
Heat career saw him tackling everything from Cliff Robertson's Oscar winning film
Charly to two of the
most legendary disaster films of all time,
The Poseidon Adventure and
The Towering Inferno. An
oeuvre such as this
might suggest that Silliphant had no intrinsic point of view and might be best understood as a "hired gun", but the fact
is virtually every screenplay of his pays special attention to character, and that's certainly the case in
The Slender
Thread, where the slow peeling back of layers of suicidal Inga (Anne Bancroft) allows the viewer to at least
approach an appreciation of why she would have taken such a drastic step.
Sidney Poitier portrays University of Washington student Alan Newell, an anthropology major (at least if one goes by
the book he rather cheekily attaches to a clipboard next to his steering wheel so that he can read while driving) who
also volunteers at the local Crisis Center help line. He arrives one night to see resident psychiatrist Dr. Coburn (Telly
Savalas, sucking on a stogie instead of
Kojak's lollipop) leaving for the evening and promising Alan a quiet night.
That of course turns out not to be the case. First Alan gets a funny call from an angry barber who is feeling the weight
of the world on his tonsorial shoulders, but soon things turn decidedly more serious when Inga calls, announcing that
she's downed a lethal dose of barbiturates. Alan, all alone at the crisis center, has to figure out how to make a
connection with Inga that will keep her on the line while he simultaneously does his best to get help to the center
which will aid him in finding the hapless woman.
Silliphant and Pollack manage to work up a considerable amount of suspense even though
The Slender Thread
is by its very nature easily one of the talkiest dramas of its era. Virtually the entire film is framed via the ongoing
conversation between Alan and Inga. Alan's center has a speaker system which allows him to have Inga's call ported
over to the speaker system, so much of the film shows the character just kind of loosely hanging on the phone, barely
even speaking into it at times. It's overly theatrical and is one of the few elements in the film that doesn't seem to ring
true. In terms of the suspense factor, a running subplot has the then high tech wizards at what must have been Bell
Telephone jumping through various hoops to try to trace the call. This part of the film is an interesting study in
dichotomy: it's a fascinating element of the film, but it instantly places the film in the "distant" past with its now archaic
technology.
A number of other characters are introduced, including Steven Hill (
Mission: Impossible, Law and Order) as
Inga's husband, whose discovery of a long ago indiscretion starts the woman off on a depressive path (though there
are indications she was a troubled soul before this revelation disrupts her marriage). Edward Asner is also on hand as
one of the policemen who are tasked with finding Inga. That allows the film to break out of the confines of Alan's Crisis
Center and Inga's flashback locales, and Pollack very handily utilizes some fantastic Seattle location footage that really
helps to localize the drama.
There is no denying that
The Slender Thread skirts with outright soap operatic elements with regard to Inga's
disintegrating marriage. To the film's credit, however, neither Bancroft nor Hill devolve into histrionics, and indeed it's
the couple's very tamped down emotional nature that gives the film much of its inherent power. This is a showcase for
Bancroft, who handles the transition from guilt to depression to thoughts of suicide incredibly well. Hill manages to
invest his character with some very nimble ambiguity—Mark probably
wants to forgive his wife, but can't quite
figure out how to get there. Poitier's role is rather interesting. It's a strange mixture of passivity with snippets of
bizarre aggression, but Poitier is such an appealing, almost intrinsically heroic, presence that the shortcomings of any
character development are subsumed by Poitier's always visceral acting style.
The Slender Thread Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
It's kind of interesting that
The Slender Thread never really was a huge theatrical blockbuster, despite the fact that
both its stars had at that time fairly recently won Best Actor and Actress Academy Awards. The film was probably too
intimate and perhaps was hobbled by being shot in black and white which by 1965 was a dying commodity. Seen in
retrospect now, however,
The Slender Thread provides Bancroft especially with a field day, and she delivers a really
moving, wonderfully nuanced performance. If the call tracing "technology" on display is almost laughable by today's
standards, it still provides a fascinating historical glimpse into the milieu of the film. It can't really be said that
The
Slender Thread is a feel good movie, despite its quasi-happy ending, but at least it helps to deliver a riveting story
about those who keep the "attempts" in the suicide statistic quoted above (and seen in the first screencap) from becoming
"succeeds".
Recommended.
