The Silent Partner (1978, Daryl Duke) (Patreon)

58/100

[Just realized I forgot to post on Thursday about this film having won the weekly poll. It did, handily beating The Wizard of Oz—a major obscurity-vs.-ubiquity upset. Sorry, got distracted even by virtual family holiday stuff. Hope yours has been as happy as it can be!]

A tale of two notes. Jotted down the first maybe 20 or 25 minutes in, the second somewhere toward the end.

• Pure present-tense behavior, no superfluous backstory/characterization

• Who the fuck is this guy?

Careful what you wish for, etc. What I most admired about The Silent Partner at its outset—protagonist Miles Cullen as blank slate, acting on instinct, driven by motives that might be inaccessible even to him—eventually came to seem like a significant liability. Gould's natural affability works both for and against him here, encouraging other characters to underestimate Miles (as noted in dialogue at one point) but also depriving him of any churning subterranean emotion that would provide at least the illusion of complexity. Instead, he winds up coming across as nothing more or less than what he is: some nebbish who accidentally stumbled into a thriller plot and is just clever enough to take advantage (albeit at considerable risk). Nothing wrong with that as a concept, but going thin on personality demands more creative plotting as compensation than this movie quite delivers. Plummer's bad guy mostly just barks threats over the phone, with some gratuitous sexual sadism thrown in; neither of the two women with whom Miles gets involved ultimately feels integral to the story (even though both become an accomplice of sorts); and the complications that arise w/r/t Miles' safety deposit box—his housekeeper unwittingly throwing away the keys, a ticking-clock lunch-break locksmith job to regain access—verge on banal. The Silent Partner really boasts one killer idea: Bank teller employs a suspected forthcoming robbery as cover for his own sub-robbery, so to speak. But I was a bit disappointed by where screenwriter Curtis Hanson and/or his source novel takes that idea, which to my mind is nowhere terribly compelling.

Expectations may well factor into that perception. At this writing, I've seen only one other film directed by Daryl Duke: 1973's Payday, which I believe I caught more or less at random during the mid-'90s period when I was auditing a lot of NYU Cinema Studies courses (mostly just to watch the films being screened). Can't say I remember much about it nearly 25 years later—certainly not enough to have any sense of Duke's style or sensibility—but I distinctly recall being pleasantly surprised, and have thought of it as a nifty little sleeper ever since. Had I encountered this film the same way, without fanfare, it's possible that I'd have liked it more...without thinking it any better than I do now, necessarily. (Same rating, in other words.) A sense of discovery breeds affection, whereas sitting down with the hope of seeing a neglected classic probably makes one hyper-critical. I should also perhaps mention that The Silent Partner was sold to me as a Christmas film, which it really isn't, despite Plummer wearing a Santa suit toward the beginning; as with Black Christmas, which I watched last December 25th, the narrative could be shifted to another season with almost no difficulty. Don't think that contributed to my feeling underwhelmed, but I note it for the record nonetheless.

Anyway, I'm clearly struggling to justify my 'meh' reaction, so let me conclude by circling back to my original beef: Miles Cullen, who cares? Not just a cipher but kind of a boring cipher. Someone whose "quirky" hobby is tropical fish—he rattles off the names of various species, cites a rare one when asked what he'd hypothetically buy with the money he did in fact steal—yet who doesn't appear to give a damn about the fish in his possession. Or about anything, really. It's not even clear to me whether Miles' invitation to Julie at the end is genuine or opportunistic, because I still have no idea who the man is or what he wants, apart from enough money to facilitate a vague "fresh start". (With which he'd do what? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Gould's an old-school movie star, so he keeps you interested even when there's otherwise no particular reason to be; the movie is never dull and often amusing (though not as amusing as it might have been had they given John Candy something to do; he was already tearing it up on SCTV by that point). But I'm no longer surprised that I'd never heard of it until fairly recently.