The Silent Partner (1978)

If you are watching one of the Ocean’s films, or seen any number of sitcom appearances by Eliot Gould and nothing else, you might think he was always more or less the silly supporting guest assigned the task to tickle your funny bone for a few minutes. But he had a whole leading man career for the decade of the 70s with a ton of highs and lows. He flopped hard and yet there are gems littered throughout the decade if you can find them. The 1978 Toronto based Christmas cat-and-mouse bank heist thriller, <b>The Silent Partner</b>, for me, is such a gem. Gould really wants out of his vault teller job. It is a daily form of soul-sucking monotony that yields a basic apartment and the occasional expensive goldfish. Gould is asked by his married boss at the bank to be a date for the operations manager (Susanna York) until he can get away from the wife to continue the affair. Gould carries a torch for York, but it just seems like they cannot quite gel, with something, or someone (mainly psychopath, Christopher Plummer, who delights in torturing or abusing hired prostitutes at his pal’s club) getting in the way. Plummer doesn’t realize just how capable an opponent Gould is when he attempts to get more cash from him than was stolen from the bank while disguised in a Santa suit. Gould skimming money off the bank and stashing it away in a Superman lunchbox, later storing it in a lockbox in the vault, Plummer had gotten away with plenty before the light was set off letting York know a robbery was occuring. But that just wasn’t enough to Plummer…he had to get his hands on what Gould had put away, watching a news program about “how much was stolen”. 

The film really hit its stride with me when Céline Lomez is introduced as a supposed nurse who tended to Gould’s dad at a home, later talking to him at the pop’s funeral, later revealed to be much more than that, but not before a sexual and romantic relationship develops. Gould’s matched wits with Plummer (who is very adept at making the skin crawl, adopting this particular fiendish grin and wicked eyes) is the film to me. You look at Gould and wonder how on earth will he be rid of Plummer…even when he finds a way to get Plummer arrested on the charge regarding leaving a young woman nearly dead after violence towards her in a sauna, smacking her around and pressing his foot down on her face through a stolen van, it isn’t enough. And yet even after Plummer gets out of jail through help from his club pal and leaves a decapitated body on the floor (and the victim’s head in Gould’s fish aquarium!) of Gould’s apartment, Gould finds ways of escape. Construction concrete, the passage of a letter once used against him, and a packet not holding the money in a suitcase, Gould still finds his ways to combat every effort Plummer believes will trap him (and eventually kill him). 

Lomez is a dynamo, full of confidence, allure, and playfulness, just almost immediately charming Eliot, who later learns of her involvement with Plummer. Eliot, though, actually knew Lomez wasn’t what she claimed to be: she smiles, after walking across Gould’s apartment naked to get a cigarette, admitting to him, “You fucked him…and me, didn’t you?” But Plummer getting out of jail early is most definitely detrimental to Lomez!

The film gets us to Gould and York together, as well as, the bank money in a suitcase, with Plummer, in a dress and wig, bleeding out on a mall escalator. Plummer even tries by the end to inform the bank security of Gould’s own robbery, dying before he can fully implicate him. What a clever little caper.