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 ****