The Silent Partner (1978)

Now we've each had a little joke at the other's expense.

When director Daryl Duke embarked on his second film, he was more experienced than most: he’d trained at Canada’s National Film Board, enjoyed a solid career as a regional television producer and director (including episodes of Night Gallery, Banacek and Harry O¹), and by the mid-1970s was juggling his fledgling career as a feature director (with 1972’s Payday) as well as establishing a new television station, CKVU, in Vancouver. He was a dependable, business-like director known for his efficiency, shooting with the editing bay in mind and able to direct actors with a soft touch. And a former writer himself, he appreciated a good screenplay, which Curtis Hanson was only too happy to provide.

Hanson was in his twenties when he scored his first professional writing assignment, The Dunwich Horror (1970), but his sights were set on the director’s chair: “I had a list of film-makers whom I admired a lot. I thought that the path I had to follow to become a director was based on how film-makers like John Huston, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges all got the opportunity to direct. All of them were extremely gifted screenwriters. They all wrote screenplays and then got a certain amount of leverage, which they then used to force production companies into letting them direct … I was blind to the fact that the studio system was almost dead and the film business was changing in such a way that there were people with comparatively lesser credentials getting the opportunity to direct.”

That opportunity came from Roger Corman, who first offered him either a women-in-chains or a motorcycle movie before they agreed on a Psycho rip-off. It was not a pleasant experience for Hanson, whose spec Sweet Kill (1973) was only made when Hanson persuaded his parents to mortgage their home to make up the budget, and which Corman retitled The Arousers (with additional sex scenes – “When I showed the film to Roger he said it needed more tits in it.”). Meanwhile, another spec script caught the attention of Robert Evans, who commissioned Hanson to adapt Romain Gary’s White Dog for Roman Polanski before Polanski’s rape charge left the movie in limbo. White Dog would eventually hit the screens in 1982 with the legendary Sam Fuller behind the camera (and rewriting the script) and would spell the end of Fuller’s American career. Luckily for Hanson, that spec script was already shooting in Toronto.

To summarise the plot of The Silent Partner is to diminish it, so I’ll stick to the premise: Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) is a mild-mannered vault teller at the First Bank of Toronto with a crush on his colleague Julie (Susannah York), who is having an affair with the bank’s manager, and a passion for tropical fish. When he finds a discarded hold-up note on one of the bank counters, he notices the similarity in handwriting between it and a mall Santa’s sign. Correctly believing that Santa is about to pay the bank a repeat visit, he starts squirrelling away cash in a Superman lunch box and when Santa does turn up, the robber ends up running off with far less than the reported amount. So far so good, but this Santa is a vengeful fellow, a sexual sadist named Reikle (Christopher Plummer), who will stop at nothing to get what he's owed.

An adaptation of Anders Bodelsen’s 1969 novel Think of a Number (or Tænk på et tal, if you’re feeling particularly Danish), The Silent Partner takes the premise and downright sprints with it, expanding on the characterisation and largely ditching the novel’s third act. Unlike the previous 1970 Danish adaptation, Duke and cinematographer Billy Williams emphasise the intimacy of the situation, with the shots favouring faces above all else, sometimes blurring the background into nothing, and the feeling of characters being in close proximity even when they’re not. Combine this with a shifting point of view and sets that seem to go out of their way to confine the characters, and you have an unusually subtle atmosphere of claustrophobic voyeurism. Everyone in this film is trapped and watched, whether it’s Reikle watching Miles’s window from a phone booth or something as ordinary as Packard keeping tabs on the workshy Raoul Simonson (an early John Candy role²). What makes The Silent Partner different is that everyone appears to be morally ambiguous, even if they’re not necessarily criminal. Julie is having an affair with Packard (clearly craving the dangerous life), Reikle’s paramour Elaine (Céline Lomez) may or may not be siding with Miles, and even poor old Simonson is gulled into a shotgun wedding to bubbly blonde Louise (Gail Dahms), her pregnancy presumably the result of her shagging Berg (a skeevy Michael Donaghue) at the work Christmas party.

Only Miles appears to have the guts to attempt escape from his workplace prison, but even his off-the-cuff plan to steal a relatively small amount of money feels more like impetuous rebellion than a criminal mastermind at work. Hitchcock may be an obvious influence on the film – not least with a tensely comic corpse disposal scene that echoes both Psycho and Frenzy – but there’s also a liberal helping of Patricia Highsmith. Miles may be the protagonist, but he’s no innocent, and Reikle may be psycho to the marrow, but he’s also strangely tragic in his relentless pursuit of Miles. The movie teases us with heterosexual romantic relationships between Miles and Julie, and then Miles and Elaine, but the core relationship is between Miles and Reikle. It may not be physical – the only share a few scenes in the same frame – but it is intimate, bordering on homoerotic.

While some ‘70s crime movies flirted with homoeroticism – I’m looking at you, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot – many were too squeamish to treat their less masculine characters with anything but disdain – paging Freebie and the Bean – let alone complexity. The Silent Partner toys with its central characters: despite being played by that 1970s sex machine Elliott Gould, Miles comes across as boyish and borderline unattractive until the first robbery makes him a TV star who’s perpetually reminded that he “photographs well.” It’s only then that Julie and a number of bank customers show a real interest in him. But even as Miles blossoms into a cigar-smoking masculine man, he’s undercut by Reikle, first interrupting him with a phone call just as he’s putting the moves on Julie, and then tainting the relationship with Elaine when he discovers that she’s been sent to keep an eye on him.

And as for Reikle himself, well, he’s certainly something. Christopher Plummer was coming up to fifty years old when he took on the role. At the time, he was probably best known for the imperious yet soft-hearted Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965)³ and more stalwart authority parts, despite a prestigious and varied stage career. While much of the characterisation is in Hanson’s script, Plummer makes some bold performance choices that make it sing, not least in the make-up and wardrobe department. Sure, he might look like an average mall Santa, but underneath that red coat is black string vest, a gold chain and – slightly later – an ankle bracelet. As the movie progresses, Reikle becomes more feminine, first with carefully applied eyeliner, then a pair of false lashes (or else Plummer had some fine lashes himself), before finally disguising himself as a woman for the climax.⁴ Along the way he presents as a dangerous pervert with a penchant for rape and battery, but one as likely to look sad and disappointed by Elaine’s betrayal as he is to lash her with his belt, and one whose threats to Miles are delivered softly, almost flirtatiously. When he interrupts Miles and Julie, he sounds like a jealous ex; when he discovers that Elaine has fallen for Miles, there’s a part of him that understands why. It’s a genuinely fascinating performance, compelling, amusing and utterly terrifying at the same time, and it plays well against a low-key turn from Gould, eschewing his inherent counterculture goofiness for a more nebbish persona. This isn’t to say it’s a boring or uncharismatic performance – Gould is the kind of actor who could have chemistry with a lamp (though York and Lomez are equally good in this regard) – more that it shows Gould’s ability to calibrate his performance as part of an ensemble. Duke apparently told him that “I don’t want any of you in this,” which Gould initially took personally, but the tension that comes from an otherwise flamboyant actor toning it down works for The Silent Partner.

Because tension is what it’s all about, and this movie has it by the truckload, mostly because neither man is all-the-way smart. Miles might be the kind of intellectual who wiles away his hours with chess problems, but his street-smarts are hard earned through vehicular theft and corpse disposal. Reikle might have animal cunning and the capacity for extreme violence, but he’s frequently surprised by Miles’s nerve and improvisational skill. Both men are ultimately fallible, and the script throws enough curveballs at both to make their cat-and-mouse game entertaining. While some critics recoiled from the most violent moment in the film – a nasty decapitation by aquarium⁵ – I happen to love it, because it doubles down on the film’s unpredictability without diminishing the drama. For modern audiences, it might be nothing more than a slasher kill, but the fact that it comes in an otherwise relatively bloodless crime drama (and the decapitation itself isn’t particularly gory) means that all bets are off.

Many thrillers would degenerate after a scene like that, mistakenly compounding the violence to falsely raise the stakes, but The Silent Partner wisely circles back, using the decapitation as added threat. For all his softly-softly approach and the occasional slap, we now know that Reikle is thoroughly unhinged. Even a public setting won’t stop him from wreaking revenge on Miles, and it’s likely that revenge will be both idiosyncratic and utterly monstrous. That the film manages to not only stick the landing (as we say in the aviation business), but also provide a pathetic closure for its leading monster is nothing short of miraculous.

The Silent Partner met with generally good reviews (most notably from Siskel and Ebert), but was hamstrung by its distributor. While the film was one of the first Carolco Pictures, a company that would go on to establish Stallone and Schwarzenegger as action stars with First Blood (1982) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), The Silent Partner was the victim of poor negotiation.⁶ As Hanson said, “The producers made a stupid deal. They were offered distribution by Paramount, but turned it down because they wanted cash up front. They went with this independent outfit that literally went bankrupt while they were distributing the movie.” As a result, the film disappeared from cinemas and became almost impossible to see. A mediocre DVD release followed in 2007, but the 2019 Kino Lorber Blu-ray is probably your best bet, with a mostly solid transfer (apart from the opening credits), an interview with Gould, and an effusive commentary track from Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson. It’s well worth seeking out, because The Silent Partner is a Christmas cracker.⁷

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Next Up: “If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl … it’s on TOO TIGHT!”

1. I would be remiss in not telling you that Duke also directed two episodes of Columbo: “Columbo Cries Wolf” (aka the one with Ian Buchanan as playboy publisher) and “Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health” (the one where George Hamilton kills a guy with a poisoned cigarette). The later Columbo episodes get a bit of stick these days, but these two are a lot of fun.

2. But not, as some think, his first. Candy had a few credits before The Silent Partner, none of them especially noteworthy. As for the name “Raoul”, this was apparently a Gould invention; he’s simple known as “Simonson” in the credits.

3. Or, as Plummer famously called it, “The Sound of Mucus.” He was not a fan, but he had nothing but good things to say about Julie Andrews, so don’t start brandishing your pitchforks just yet.

4. It’s worth noting that Reikle’s drag in the final sequence isn’t played for laughs, nor is it treated with the same “It’s a man, man!” disgust that usually crops up (hello again, Freebie and the Bean). You could even argue it’s a more natural disguise for Reikle than the Santa outfit at the beginning.

5. Duke refused to shoot the decapitation scene and walked off the picture. Hanson was brought in to direct some pick-ups and do post-production, but there’s no evidence (that I could find) that Hanson directed that particular scene. It feels like producer intervention to me, more in line with the Carolco brand than Hanson’s, whose movies as director weren’t that violent.

6. Multiple sources back this up, with Gould naming executive producer Garth H. Dabrinksy as the intransigent one. Dabrinsky wasn’t a total business dunce - according to cinematographer Billy Williams, the man invented the modern multiplex (Cineplex) - but eventually ended up in the clink on fraud and forgery charges. Ah, the movie business.

7. Yes, I know only half the movie takes place at Christmas. Shut up. ‘Tis the fucking season.