Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Celine Lomez, John Candy. Dir. Daryl Duke, StudioCanal, 1978
I watch movies I've never seen almost everyday. Most of them are good. Some are fun. Many are great. Once in awhile, though, one comes along greater than usual, a picture that lights me up from its first frame to its last, a nigh on perfect film. Daryl Duke's 1978 heist thriller, THE SILENT PARTNER belongs in the last designation. It's as smart, sexy, cool, well paced, and ingeniously plotted a film as I've seen in the first half of 2021.
I don't often do this, but I copied&pasted the first two grafs of Wikipedia's plot synopsis. It sets up the basic situation more neatly than I would, giving away nothing of what's to come.
"Miles Cullen, (Elliott Gould), a bored teller at a small bank in a large Toronto shopping mall (the Eaton Centre), accidentally learns that his place of business is about to be robbed when he finds a discarded hold up note on one of the bank's counters. He also figures out who the would-be robber is when he sees a mall Santa Claus (Plummer) hanging around outside the bank whose "give to charity" sign has handwriting, (especially the letter G) similar to that on the discarded note.
Instead of informing his bosses or contacting the police, Miles begins stashing the cash from his window's transactions in an old lunch box rather than in the bank's till. When the Santa Claus robber holds up Miles at the teller's desk, Miles, having expected his doing so, hands over a small amount and then reports he gave all the money from his day’s transactions."
Once Plummer realizes Gould has taken most of the money, he starts stalking, then calling him, trying to strike a bargain to get it back, intimating that, because each can incriminate the other, they are partners, much like Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. Part of what made PARTNER so perfect is that, having introduced the Hitchcockian premise, director Daryl Duke at once plunged me into such a well-paced, intricately-plotted story, driven by great performances, good laughs, a little sex, and some horrific gore, that I didn't think of Hitch again until almost the end of the movie. When Plummer reaffirms their partnership, it felt like a reveal, not what I already knew.
At the time, Gene Siskel called SILENT PARTNER "predictable, but so clever it doesn't matter." I have to disagree, to an extent. In the film's first half, I agreed, but the first half served as misdirection. When Gould tells Plummer to go fuck himself, he's keeping the money, it came out of nowhere yet didn't feel contrived. Cullen went from predictable to maverick in three words.
For the rest of the movie, Cullen kept me guessing, while remaining true to his character. In the opening moments, Cullen came across as dull, plodding, and obvious. By the climax and ending, he shows himself to be smarter and more ruthless even than Plummer, who by then has turned out a very scary guy.
That kind of script-flip, in the wrong hands, kills movies, the character's actions wildly implausible based on what a viewer has already been told and shown. It never happened here. Even as Miles's actions become more erratic, he always makes sure they align with the character he established at the start. His seeming bovine dullness is boredom. His lack of spontanaeity suggests he's just this side of stupid when, in fact, he's the smartest guy in the room. Though Plummer proves far more psychotic than I imagined - which was quite a bit after he fucked and beat a prostitute almost comatose in the early minutes - Gould, awakened from his career-stupor, outwits him at most every turn.
Though the writing defines taut, it's the cast that sells SILENT PARTNER. I've seen Plummer play criminals and violent men, but never a brutal, sadistic, and charismatic psychopath. He makes the most of the opportunity, and SILENT PARTNER has to rank as one of his career-best performances.
Gould and York match him beat for beat, however. York stood in for me, in a way, her Julie Carver as attracted to and bewildered by Gould as I in the film's second half. York played Lara, Kal El's mother, in SUPERMAN the same year and she could not be more different. In SUPERMAN she's regal and remote, in SILENT PARTNER warm and welcoming. Two impressive, yet distinctive, performances.
I'm a fan of Elliott Gould from the late '70s, when my parents took me to the opening night of A BRIDGE TOO FAR, so I was predisposed to like him going into this movie. He makes that so easy - he also projects a certain warmth. Miles Cullen starts out a maddening, totally relatable dork, more interested in his tropical fish collection than in scoring points with Julie. When he blew sleeping with her, I didn't know whether to cry in frustration or laugh in identification, but I still liked him. By the end, when he's both criminal mastermind and socially awkward, I felt willing to go wherever Miles Cullen wanted to take me.
I've cheated in this writeup. Not wanting to spoil the story, I've not mentioned Elaine (Celine Lomez), a dark and dusky, sensuous, seductive, French Canadian sent by Plummer to keep tabs on Miles after Cullen gets him jailed on a minor charge. Lomez lost out to Tanya Roberts for Charlie's Angels, as ABC execs deemed her "too sexy for primetime." She is sexy, but it comes from her confidence and intelligence as much as her looks. Lomez, a onetime teen pop star in Canada, never established herself as a star in the US, which surprises me. She's as good as Gould (sorry) in their scenes together, and holds her own with Plummer, which cannot be easy, though she made it look that way. John Candy has one of his first roles, a small part as a bank employee named Simonson, whose fiancee cuckolds him at the company Christmas party. He's good, and though he didn't get a chance to show his comedy chops, he did show me something I'd never seen before, being almost height/weight proportionate. Sort of a cruddy thing to say, but it's impossible to ignore.
I've tried to keep as much secret as possible while still making THE SILENT PARTNER sound like a must see. I only heard of this picture for the first time a week ago, when the Just the Discs podcasr featured it. I knew almost nothing going in, which feels like the best way to see it. I thought the movie good within the first few minutes. It went to "really good," then to "cool as hell," and quickly on to "oh this rules," before the first reel ended, then stayed there the rest of the way.
I see a lot of movies. Most good, some great. A movie like THE SILENT PARTNER, which could be one of the greatest unheralded pictures of the 1970s, inhabits a slot all its own, though. It's perfect. I can't find fault in it. It never insulted my intelligence, never got distracted by subplot, never slowed down and became a drag. Howard Hawks's highest compliment was "He was good."
THE SILENT PARTNER is good.
That kind of script-flip, in the wrong hands, kills movies, the character's actions wildly implausible based on what a viewer has already been told and shown. It never happened here. Even as Miles's actions become more erratic, he always makes sure they align with the character he established at the start. His seeming bovine dullness is boredom. His lack of spontanaeity suggests he's just this side of stupid when, in fact, he's the smartest guy in the room. Though Plummer proves far more psychotic than I imagined - which was quite a bit after he fucked and beat a prostitute almost comatose in the early minutes - Gould, awakened from his career-stupor, outwits him at most every turn.
Though the writing defines taut, it's the cast that sells SILENT PARTNER. I've seen Plummer play criminals and violent men, but never a brutal, sadistic, and charismatic psychopath. He makes the most of the opportunity, and SILENT PARTNER has to rank as one of his career-best performances.
Gould and York match him beat for beat, however. York stood in for me, in a way, her Julie Carver as attracted to and bewildered by Gould as I in the film's second half. York played Lara, Kal El's mother, in SUPERMAN the same year and she could not be more different. In SUPERMAN she's regal and remote, in SILENT PARTNER warm and welcoming. Two impressive, yet distinctive, performances.
I'm a fan of Elliott Gould from the late '70s, when my parents took me to the opening night of A BRIDGE TOO FAR, so I was predisposed to like him going into this movie. He makes that so easy - he also projects a certain warmth. Miles Cullen starts out a maddening, totally relatable dork, more interested in his tropical fish collection than in scoring points with Julie. When he blew sleeping with her, I didn't know whether to cry in frustration or laugh in identification, but I still liked him. By the end, when he's both criminal mastermind and socially awkward, I felt willing to go wherever Miles Cullen wanted to take me.
I've cheated in this writeup. Not wanting to spoil the story, I've not mentioned Elaine (Celine Lomez), a dark and dusky, sensuous, seductive, French Canadian sent by Plummer to keep tabs on Miles after Cullen gets him jailed on a minor charge. Lomez lost out to Tanya Roberts for Charlie's Angels, as ABC execs deemed her "too sexy for primetime." She is sexy, but it comes from her confidence and intelligence as much as her looks. Lomez, a onetime teen pop star in Canada, never established herself as a star in the US, which surprises me. She's as good as Gould (sorry) in their scenes together, and holds her own with Plummer, which cannot be easy, though she made it look that way. John Candy has one of his first roles, a small part as a bank employee named Simonson, whose fiancee cuckolds him at the company Christmas party. He's good, and though he didn't get a chance to show his comedy chops, he did show me something I'd never seen before, being almost height/weight proportionate. Sort of a cruddy thing to say, but it's impossible to ignore.
I've tried to keep as much secret as possible while still making THE SILENT PARTNER sound like a must see. I only heard of this picture for the first time a week ago, when the Just the Discs podcasr featured it. I knew almost nothing going in, which feels like the best way to see it. I thought the movie good within the first few minutes. It went to "really good," then to "cool as hell," and quickly on to "oh this rules," before the first reel ended, then stayed there the rest of the way.
I see a lot of movies. Most good, some great. A movie like THE SILENT PARTNER, which could be one of the greatest unheralded pictures of the 1970s, inhabits a slot all its own, though. It's perfect. I can't find fault in it. It never insulted my intelligence, never got distracted by subplot, never slowed down and became a drag. Howard Hawks's highest compliment was "He was good."
THE SILENT PARTNER is good.
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