The story goes that Elliott Gould screened The Silent Partner for Alfred Hitchcock after it was finished. Hitchcock apparently liked it, as well he might, since it’s about 75 per cent Hitchcock by look and theme.
There’s a blonde, a bit of mistaken identity, a nobody who finds he’s a somebody when tested, and even a nod to Hitchcock’s set pieces, particularly in the finale.
Gould plays a meek bank teller who discovers quite by chance that there’s going to be a raid on his bank, and that a guy disguised as Santa Claus is going to do it – I won’t explain but it’s either ingenious or ridiculous depending on which side of the bed you got out of. And so Miles (Gould) decides on a little bit of heisting himself.
Santa comes in, pulls a gun and orders Miles to put the money in the bag. Miles puts some money in the bag but the bulk of it in his briefcase which is down below the counter. The robber flees and Miles goes home with the loot. Simples.
But it doesn’t end there, because once “Santa” – in fact a hard-bitten and very violent career criminal called Reikle – hears on the TV news that around $48K was stolen, and not the few hundred he has, he puts two and two together and sets out on a campaign to remove the money from Miles’s clutches.
Second wrinkle. Miles, emboldened by his own audacity, and wanting to impress his blonde co-worker, Julie (Susannah York), decides to fight back. The worm turns. Or, to swap out animals, a cat-and-mouse thriller takes shape, with Reikle making increasingly threatening noises in Miles’s direction and Miles responding with increasing displays of resourcefulness.
This comes to a head when Miles meets Elaine (Céline Lomez), a super sexy “nurse”, at his father’s funeral and is surprised to find that she finds him hot as hell. She, obviously, is working for Reikle, but may also have her own best interests at heart. Miles, no fool, gets all this and decides to play Elaine both ways.
The casting is great in this movie. York doesn’t get much to do, and the film isn’t sure what the point of her is, beyond being a Hitchcock reference. Miles woos Julie, but Julie isn’t interested. Then she is, then she isn’t, then she is. It gets a bit boring.
Lomez is sensationally good as duplicitous Elaine, also as hot as she’s meant to be and obligingly disrobing, as most of the women in this movie do at one point or another. Reikle is played by Christopher Plummer, always a great bad guy, this time out wearing just a touch of guyliner, to suggest some sexual ambiguity. In one early scene we see Reikle knocking a blameless young woman about for having the audacity to proposition him sexually. Later, for the film’s big finish, he’ll get into women’s clothes.
Gould is fabulous throughout, a touch of that Cary Grant suaveté and at the height of his charm. Gould, like so many American peers, did not make enough good films at his peak – this is an exception, and much is made of Gould’s way of suggesting he’s privy to some secret joke, which he’s inviting the audience to share but not the other characters alongside him.
John Candy also has a very small straight role as one of the fellow bank tellers with the hots for another co-worker, Louise (Gail Dahms-Bonine), who has the hots for Berg (Michael Donaghue), another co-worker.
That’s the film’s great strength, in fact, the way it sketches out a whole skein of relationships among the co-workers at the bank, before introducing the heist element, and then skilfully plaits the two elements together.
It was written by Curtis Hanson, who also directed the odd bit of it after Daryl Duke refused to shoot a particularly gruesome ending for one of the characters and walked off the production. Hanson would later have his big moment in the sun with LA Confidential, another confident and playful swim in generic waters.
DP Billy Williams shoots it all warm and rich. Oscar Peterson’s score (his only for a feature) is Bernard Herrmann-adjacent at times, pointing up even more the Hitchcockiness of it all.
I wonder how much Hitchcock actually liked it, whether he thought it was too obviously on its knees in front of him, whether he wouldn’t have shot some of the scenes a little less prosaically. I had all these thoughts at one point or another, and yet right at the end, when Hanson pulls his big twist finale, and stages a shootout on an escalator in a shopping mall, all the tiny objections fell away. Very nice, very neat, very ingenious.
The Silent Partner – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
