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. This is a frightening novel of rabid political correctness, mistaken identity, mounting circumstances, and the will to destroy a man. 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. Then a woman accuses him of exposing himself over the summer in the university library, and the quotes take on a new seriousness, starting with Ernest Borgnine’s “playing out the string” from his movie The Wild Bunch. Borgnine says this directly to indicate a fatalistic will to continue despite overwhelming odds. And sure enough, he and his friends are killed by gunfire. Amid mounting accusations will McCabe end in a similar spiral? Especially after he refuses to hire a lawyer and contacts a local journalist to give his side of the story .