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Long-distance suspense, an interracial relationship classical Hollywood can accept. Aerial glimpses of Seattle descend to connect people going different ways, the housewife (Anne Bancroft) runs a red light while her husband (Steven Hill) sails away, the psychology student (Sidney Poitier) checks in for a volunteer shift at the Crisis Clinic. She takes an overdose of barbiturates and phones in, her voice has the woozy calm of a resigned soul floating toward oblivion. "I recommend it." The volunteer labors to keep her on the line so the call can be traced, "rapport" is the word, flashbacks fill the gaps. "You've been suffered and tolerated. Me, too. Okay?" An intriguing construction, parallel to Hathaway's Fourteen Hours but with sundry elements from Cocteau (La voix humaine for the crux, Le Sang d'un poète for the ebony guardian angel), Sydney Pollack pulls it together in the intersection of cinema, television and radio. Urban solitude and mediating technology, the unfinished sketch and the cavernous switching facility. The fisherman is hardened with distrust when his wife's secret is revealed, her tender memories of him yield to an eclipsing profile against discotheque lights. Toy boat in the fountain, dying bird on the beach, an overcast note adduced from La Notte. The adroit technique alternates stillness with pans and zooms, location work has the camera fighting for space in a hotel lobby during a rowdy convention. "I wish I'd met you under different circumstances." "Let's make the circumstances." The wall speaker with Bancroft's disembodied huskiness reappears as Kubrick's one-eyed space computer, of course. With Telly Savalas, Ed Asner, Dabney Coleman, Indus Arthur, Jason Wingreen, Paul Newlan, and H.M. Wynant. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |