Please don't spend money on this.

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

...But that's unless he gets help there in time!....He is Sidney Poitier; She is Anne Bancroft, and their entire interaction throughout this mostly gripping drama about a race against time is on the telephone. Poitier works as a volunteer at a Suicide Prevention Hotline, and Bancroft is going to be the most challenging call he ever takes. She's messed up from her husband (Steven Hill) finding out that their young son was actually fathered by another man, and in addition to other insecurities has taken an overdose of barbiturates. Poitier has 30 minutes to find her or she will not make it. Not only is time running out, but so are the attempts to locate where her call is coming from. Bancroft, wallowing in both self pity and the cruelty of life, has her story told through flashback, and goes to great lengths to show the many layers of this fascinating character. In spite of her self-pity, she is never so pathetic that you loose interest in her. Poitier shows at great length how difficult it is to play a character basically being a "reactor". Audiences of the 1960's really came to like him because of his incredible humanity no matter what character he played. He joined the ranks of such previous "every man" such as James Stewart, Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.Telly Savalas and Ed Asner appear in major supporting roles (yes, Kojak and Lou Grant in the same film, although they do not appear together) with Greg Jarvis as Bancroft's loving son. Sydney Pollack shows the intensity and humanity of his many classic films, although this has a few moments of eye rolling 60's clichés. Still, with two actors of stage background letting themselves go, it is never dull, and it makes you really care about the outcome. Bancroft and Poitier are two actors excellent both in method and technique, and are helped by a gripping screenplay by the legendary Stirling Sipphilant. With adult dramas such as "Darling" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" testing the production code, Hollywood was really escaping from the themes it had previously not allowed to dramatize. While this may not be considered a classic, it will leave you almost breathless with a race where running or car chases are absolutely not involved.

Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft are marvelous in this film where a suicidal Bancroft calls a crisis clinic to get help after she swallows a lot of pills. Poitier, a psychology, student answers her distressful call and the film is devoted to his keeping her on the phone. Poitier is terrific here conveying emotions of keeping cool under duress while scolding Bancroft for what she has done as well as her refusal to say where she is.There are excellent uses of flashbacks showing why Bancroft came to this situation.Sydney Pollack's excellent direction highlights a very good film showing what crisis intervention specialists have to go through as well as 1960s technology in desperately trying to trace phone calls from people in deep trouble.Anne Bancroft would make her famous performance two years later as the sexually frustrated Mrs. Robinson in the hit "The Graduate." This picture was a warm up for that great performance. In "Slender Thread" she conveys the emotional of a very troubled woman pushed to the brink of self-destruction. Another great Bancroft performance is depicted here.

I came in late on this movie this morning on TCM, and then suspected it was a Sydney Pollack film when I heard the line, "Do you think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?" spoken by Steven Hill to Anne Bancroft. This line is, remarkably, in two other Sydney Pollack films that I know of -- Three Days of the Condor, and most recently in The Interpreter. While it is a great line and distills an idea very well, the self-referential aspect of it is a little odd. However, it is a well-shot film and reminded me of the work of John Frankenheimer. There are some fantastic shots in Seattle locations, and Anne Bancroft looks so beautiful and sad.

I haven't seen "The Tender Thread" but am certain it was a knock off of a much earlier TV version. Sidney Poitier was in that one too, but to the best of my recollection, there was only one set, the hotline phone room. The basic plot seems similar to your commentator's impressions of Tender Thread, but in the end, they get hold of the husband and work him over pretty good for getting mad about his wife's deceit and blame him for Moms feeble suicide attempt. I consider the earlier version the beginning of the lunatic notion that a man should be responsible for another's children. Monte Haun