Playing Out the String

If Alfred Hitchcock had lived to direct a movie about the abuse of political correctness, it would have been Playing Out the String. Robert McCabe is a professor of film at a Tennessee university. Until this semester he's passed his time trading film quotes with another professor to make a game of current events. But when a woman accuses McCabe of exposing himself in the university library, the quotes take on a seriousness, especially Ernest Borgnine's "playing out the string" from The Wild Bunch. Borgnine says this to indicate a fatalistic will to continue despite overwhelming odds. And sure enough, he and his friends are killed by massive gunfire. Amid massive and mounting accusations will McCabe perish in a similar spiral?