(Inga reveals that she tricked a hard-working man with middle-class aspirations into marrying her while she carried another’s fetus once this garishly bourgeois deception catches up with her, her flashbacks become tedious and pity-ridden.) Still, Alan’s stabs at “talking method” reconnaissance prove ineffective, in spite of their aims’ simplicity.īut Pollack reassures us that he’s only interested in their after-hours psychobabble insofar as its vapidity suggests their humanly estrangement. If an unbreakable rhythm is all that needs to be established between the characters, exchanging vibrant lies would be more expedient than trading difficult, silly truths. This objective is so psychologically reductive that it nearly robs the film of its plausibility. Alan’s goal throughout the tossing and turning of the movie’s 90-plus minutes is not to save Inga from her menopausal self (the suicide has already been initiated, and she’s past the point of persuasion), but to keep her on the line while policemen trace the call. The Slender Thread is in fact slick anti-theater, and its chief topic is, if not precisely race, then the difficulty of communication among the subtly disenfranchised. The extroverted academic assiduity of Poitier’s protagonist notwithstanding, no one acknowledges his anomalous skin tone.īoth assumptions are eventually proven false. Second, race appears irrelevant to the story. During the wordless, en plein air credit sequence we even feel the film gulping down its own aerial B-roll, as though the plot were about to be locked away. First, the seemingly predestined phone call acts as both plot device and dramatic tether, and since Alan’s action can’t exceed the length of the telephonic wire, we prepare ourselves for slickly cinematized theater a la Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men. He’s alone for less than five minutes before Inga rings his hotline, feeling unusually chatty after downing a lethal dose of barbiturates.Ĭertain assumptions about what follows have been encouraged by this prologue. Alan soon reaches his destination, where he relieves the office’s daytime staff and settles in for solo nightshift. Meanwhile, the forlorn Inga (Anne Bancroft) runs stop signs and red lights with frantic, if ambiguous, purpose. Alan (Sidney Poitier), with a pencil tucked behind his ear and a textbook conspicuously clipped to the dashboard, heads to his gig-for-college-credit at a crisis center. It’s quitting hour in Seattle, and in the long shadow of the Space Needle two cars cross paths en route to opposite ends of the city.
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