‘The Silent Partner’ is an extraordinarily taut and imaginative thriller which didn’t make much of an impression upon its 1978 release, and is not an easy film to get hold of. Yet, it could be considered the template for the sort of thrillers that defined the crime and action genre over the next few decades, with scenes of a dying hitman on an escalator something that Brian De Palma drew on in ‘Carlito’s Way’, and the interplay between hunter and prey is a trope that Wolfgang Petersen and Clint Eastwood drew on so effectively in the cat and mouse revenge thriller ‘In the Line of Fire’ in 1993. Add to this shades of De Palma’s ‘Dressed to Kill’ with killers adorning different personae and identities, including gender reversals, before initiating bloody acts of vengeance, ‘The Silent Partner’ is an intense and disturbing psychological exposition which showcases Christopher Plummer as an especially sinister, venal killer who does not respond well when he realizes that his robbery of a bank in a shopping mall in the run up to the festive season, when dressed as Father Christmas, has been thwarted by the mild mannered cashier, played by Elliott Gould, who anticipates the robbery and swaps the money in advance so that it looks like Plummer has gotten away with a fortune.

Gould, who has instead managed to store the stolen money in his brief case sitting beneath him at the cashier’s desk, is somewhat drifting through life and entertains dreams of a life beyond his mundane, domestic circumstances, and who is the last person anyone would expect to be guilty of a bank robbery. A largely overlooked figure even within his own banking circle, where he is often asked by his manager to cover for him when the boss is having an affair with one of his employees, played by Susannah York, to whom Gould himself takes a shine but lacks the confidence to follow through on his feelings, Gould incites the wrath of the psychopathic Plummer who deduces that he has been outsmarted. The screenplay is by Curtis Hanson, who went on to win a Best Screenplay Oscar two decades later for ‘LA Confidential’, and is not dissimilar to the way in the 90s thrillers he directed ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ and ‘The River Wild’ innocuous, kindly seeming characters are able to ingratiate themselves into the lives of a family with a view to taking something from them that they want for themselves.

Gould’s character, Miles, is far more aware of his colleagues and environment than he lets on, and this film falls into noir territory in the way that it presents an everyday, average Joe who is lured into committing an action that goes against his nature, and which leads to a chain of consequences from which he cannot extricate himself. Gould enters the criminal and sadistic world of Plummer and has to think like him in order to outwit him, and we are never certain in this drama, replete with a femme fatale for whom Gould falls and who it turns out is working for Plummer, what the outcome will be. Noir dramas characteristically don’t have happy endings, and here there is no obvious sense of unqualified good vs. evil for which we can root.

Gould is by no means venal, but he is quite unwilling to extricate himself from the world of Plummer, and resorts to increasingly desperate measures in order to keep Plummer at bay and to hold on to the money that he has so ingeniously deprived the bank robber from appropriating. Indeed, Gould seems almost turned on by the adventure which is far removed from his usual hobbies of collecting rare fish and playing solitary games of chess. Ultimately, ‘The Silent Partner’ asks in Hitchcockian fashion what happens when a good person makes a bad decision, and the extent to which they are seduced or implicated in their misdemeanours and choose to continue down a path that leads to even greater risk, or to walk away. ‘The Silent Partner’ is not fundamentally at odds in this respect with Al Pacino’s gangster Charlie in ‘Carlito’s Way who is simultaneously a changed man – reformed, rehabilitated, redeemed – while pathologically incapable of resisting being dragged, one last time, into the world of crime and corruption, even if the endings of the two films play out differently with the question of whether we can truly reach the Paradise of our dreams.