The Silent Partner
Directed by Daryl Duke and Curtis Hanson
Written by Curtis Hanson from a novel by Anders Bodelsen
1978/Canada
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Harry Reikle: I’m just going to give you a little time… to try to be reasonable. If you decide you’re not going to be reasonable, then one night when you come home, you’ll find me *inside*, waiting for you. And that will be the night you’ll wish you’d never been born.
This prototypical 70’s thriller gets an extra star for the performance of Christopher Plummer.
Elliott Gould plays chief bank teller Miles Cullen. He is outwardly quiet and nerdy with his main interest being aquarium fish. Fellow employee Julie (Susannah York) is dating her married boss. Miles takes an interest in Julie too.
One day Miles finds a deposit slip that has a stick up instructions on it. He figures out that the writing on the slip is the same as that of a Santa Claus in the mall. So he slips $40,000 of the bank’s money into his lunchbox before Santa has a chance to do his robbery. He hasn’t counted on the wrath of the sadistic psychopath bank robber Arthur Reikle (Christopher Plummer) who stalks and terrorizes Miles relentlessly until the explosive climax.
Christopher Plummer is absolutely the best thing about this movie. He is scary, charming, cunning and deadly by turns. Otherwise, I found this to suffer from a bad case of seventy-itis. The whole plot is about sticking it to the man and the bank robbery is treated as just another way of accomplishing this. There is a fair amount of cursing and sex just because they could. The whole story takes place at Christmas time possibly making it a worthy entry in your offbeat Christmas movie list.
Trailer (spoiler)
